The Gene Ontology Project

The Gene Ontology (GO) project is a collaborative effort to address the need for consistent descriptions of gene products in different databases. The project began as a collaboration between three model organism databases, FlyBase (Drosophila), the Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD) and the Mouse Genome Database (MGD), in 1998. Since then, the GO Consortium has grown to include many databases, including several of the world's major repositories for plant, animal and microbial genomes.