Analysis pipelines in genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics commonly produce lists of genes, e.g. differentially expressed genes. Often these lists overlap only partly or not at all and contain too many genes for manual comparison. However, using background knowledge, such as the functional annotations of the genes, the lists can be abstracted to functional terms. One approach is to run Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analyses to determine over- and/or underrepresented functions for every list of genes. Due to the hierarchical structure of the Gene Ontology, lists of enriched GO terms can contain many closely related terms, rendering the lists still long, redundant, and difficult to interpret for researchers.
Go-Compass (Gene Ontology list comparison using Semantic Similarity) is a visual analytics tool for the dispensability reduction and visual comparison of lists of GO terms. For dispensability reduction, we adapted the REVIGO algorithm, a summarization method based on semantic similarity of GO terms, to perform hierarchical dispensability clustering on multiple lists. In an interactive dashboard, GO-Compass offers several visualizations for the comparison and improved interpretability of GO terms lists. The hierarchical dispensability clustering is visualized as a tree, where users can interactively filter out dispensable GO terms and create flat clusters. The flat clusters are visualized in animated treemaps, and are compared using a correlation heatmap, UpSet plots, and bar charts.
Visit GO-Compass here: https://go-compass-tuevis.cs.uni-tuebingen.de/
GitHub: https://github.com/Integrative-Transcriptomics/GO-Compass
Publication: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cgf.14829