Generation of 12 major-terms for interpretating human cellular processes

As the Gene Ontology (GO) knowledgebase becomes more and more complicated, it is difficult for researchers to follow and get a comprehensive overview of cellular processes. Here, we developed a classification strategy by systematically investigating shared genes between any two terms. Using this strategy, we streamlined the 66 direct child terms of human cellular processes to 12 major-terms, and the interactions were further validated using protein-protein interaction networks. We subsequently applied these 12 major-terms to investigate the distribution of transcription factors, kinases, and several cancer genomes, and also compared our framework with other GO term redundancy reduction tools. To facilitate its usage, we provide a web-based tool. Importantly, these 12 GO major-terms provide researchers with a more comprehensive overview of cellular processes, and also serve as an effective tool for enrichment analysis.