Ontology-based cross-species integration and analysis of Saccharomyces cerevisiae phenotypes

Ontologies are widely used in the biomedical community for annotation and integration of databases. Formal definitions can relate classes from different ontologies and thereby integrate data across different levels of granularity, domains and species. We have applied this methodology to the Ascomycete Phenotype Ontology (APO), enabling the reuse of various orthogonal ontologies and we have converted the phenotype associated data found in the SGD following our proposed patterns. We have integrated the resulting data in the cross-species phenotype network PhenomeNET, and we make both the cross-species integration of yeast phenotypes and a similarity-based comparison of yeast phenotypes across species available in the PhenomeBrowser. Furthermore, we utilize our definitions and the yeast phenotype annotations to suggest novel functional annotations of gene products in yeast.