Figure 1.

Comparison of the two methods used for editing the Gene Ontology. Comparison of the two methods used for editing the Gene Ontology, i.e. slimming and clipping. Slimming of GO involves the assignment of high level terms from each of the three major gene ontologies, namely cellular component, biological process, and molecular function, to a set of genes of interest. Clipping of GO involves editing of GO according to biological relevance to the domain of choice. Creation of a GO subset by clipping is done by removing terms (from all hierarchal levels of the ontology) if they are not functionally relevant to the domain of interest. Terms that are located in levels higher to relevant terms are kept. Thus, biologically irrelevant terms are only removed if they are not parental to relevant terms.