Welcome to the Sequence Ontology
The Sequence Ontology (SO) is a community project that defines a shared vocabulary for biological sequence annotation.
Originally developed within the Gene Ontology Consortium, SO is one of the founding members of the OBO Foundry. Contributors to SO include, among others, the NCBI, EMBL-EBI, the Alliance of Genome Resources, and the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
Our aim is to develop an ontology suitable for describing all features of biological sequences.
Introduction
SO terms describe classes and subclasses of sequence features, sequence attributes, sequence variants, sequence collections and their relationships. Biological features are those which are defined by their disposition to be involved in a biological process. Examples include binding_site and exon. Biomaterial features are those which are intended for use in an experiment such as aptamer and PCR_product. There are also experimental features which are the result of an experiment. SO also provides a rich set of attributes to describe these features such as “polycistronic” and “maternally imprinted”.
SO provides a structured vocabulary to:
- Transmit sequence annotations between annotation databases and users, especially records formatted as GFF3 or GVF flat files.
- Represent and query annotations across genomic databases.
- Describe types of sequence variation like structural variants and functional variants.
Get involved
Contributions from the sequence annotation community are welcome. For questions, feedback, or new term suggestions, please use SO's GitHub Issue Tracker.