In this recipe, we will introduce the usage of gene ontology information again by querying the Ensembl REST API. Gene ontologies are controlled vocabularies to annotate genes and gene products. These are made available as trees of concepts (with more general concepts near the top of the hierarchy). There are three domains for gene ontologies: a cellular component, the molecular function, and the biological process.
As with the previous recipe, we do not require any pre-downloaded data, but as we are using web APIs, internet access will be needed. The amount of data transferred will be limited.
As usual, you can find this content in the Chapter03/Gene_Ontology.ipynb
Notebook file. We will make use of the do_request
function, which is defined in the first step of the previous recipe (Finding orthologues with the Ensembl REST API). To draw GO trees, we will use pygraphviz
, a graph-drawing library.