Exclusive functional signatures for gene annotation with vast OpenOrd layout

A biological study can produce a limited number of marker genes, not large enough to be used in gene set enrichment analysis. Here we suggest VOL-Gene, a graph-based algorithm that partitions all genes into non-overlapping classes of functionally related genes, thus assigning a single function to each gene. To this end, many functional signatures are combined into a single weighted graph, which is partitioned into cliques. For a poorly annotated marker gene, our approach fetches a number of genes that belong to the same class, some of which can be well annotated and are likely to take part in the same biological process.