Automated Gene Function Prediction- Applying Ontology and Machine Learning

The objective of biological research is to understand the structural and thefunctional aspects of life. Though living organisms are diverse in almost everyaspect they are made of cells and share the same machinery for their basicfunctions. The structural and functional aspect of life is traceable to genesgiven that the information from the genes determine the protein compositionand thereby the function of the cell. Hence predicting the functions ofindividual genes is the gate way for understanding the blueprint of life. Therationale behind the ongoing genome sequencing projects is to utilize thesequence information to understand the genes and their functions. Theexponential increase in the amount of sequence information enunciated theneed for an automated approach to acquire knowledge about their biologicalfunction. This book introduces the general strategies used in the automatedannotation of genes and protein sequences. Specifically it describes amethod utilizing the machine learning approach to predict gene function.This book is addressed to researchers involved in predicting gene functionand applying machine learning algorithms to other biological problems.