This document discusses using co-annotation analysis and biological knowledge as a quality control procedure for gene ontology (GO) annotations. It describes a multi-step iterative process where GO term intersections are identified and used to generate rules of expected relationships. Violations of these rules are reported to contributing databases and used to identify annotation errors. The process led to over 100 rules being created and 83 rule violations found by analyzing 568 gene annotations across several species. Future work involves implementing the rules directly into the GO pipeline and expanding the approach to additional biological processes and functions.
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