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A new gene ontology-based measure for the functional similarity of gene products
Guo-Long Qi1, Shi-Yu Qian, Ji-Qian Fang
1Department of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510080, China.
Background:
Although biomedical ontologies have standardized the representation of gene products across species and databases, a method for determining the functional similarities of gene products has not yet been developed.
Methods:
We proposed a new semantic similarity measure based on Gene Ontology that considers the semantic influences from all of the ancestor terms in a graph. Our measure was compared with Resnik's measure in two applications, which were based on the association of the measure used with the gene co-expression and the protein-protein interactions.
Results:
The results showed a considerable association between the semantic similarity and the expression correlation and between the semantic similarity and the protein-protein interactions, and our measure performed the best overall.
Conclusion:
These results revealed the potential value of our newly proposed semantic similarity measure in studying the functional relevance of gene products.
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