LipidGO: database for lipid-related GO terms and applications

Lipid, an essential class of biomolecules, is receiving increasing attention in the research community, especially with the development of analytical technique like mass spectrometry. Gene Ontology (GO) is the de facto standard function annotation scheme for gene products. Identification of both explicit and implicit lipid-related GO terms will help lipid research in many ways, e.g. assigning lipid function in protein function prediction. We have constructed a Web site 'LipidGO' that facilitates browsing and searching lipid-related GO terms. An expandable hierarchical GO tree is constructed that allows users to find lipid-related GO terms easily. To support large-scale analysis, a user is able to upload a list of gene products or a list of GO terms to find out which of them is lipid related. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of 'LipidGO' by two applications: (i) identifying lipid-related gene products in model organisms and (ii) discovering potential novel lipid-related molecular functions LipidGO is available at http://compbio.ddns.comp.nus.edu.sg/%7elipidgo/index.php.