Gene Ontology (GO) is the de facto standard to describe the biological function of genes and is the most widely used biomedical ontology. The functional gene annotation team at UCL has submitted over 10% of the manual Gene Ontology annotations associated with human genes and is now contributing protein interaction data to the EBI resource IntAct. Our annotations are made publically available, through our close collaboration with the European Bioinformatics Institute and have been propagated through the world’s leading biological databases, including Ensembl and NCBI Gene, and even to Wikipedia.

Our unique curation approach enables us to align the curation process with the expertise available at UCL. In addition, we have carried out functional analyses of high-throughput datasets (Alam-Faruque, et al., 2011), which demonstrate that the annotations we create have a significant impact on data interpretation. The importance of these annotations is now recognised by disease-focused grant bodies, including the British Heart Foundation, Parkinson’s UK and Alzheimer's Research UK, all of which have provided funding that has enabled the annotation team at UCL to expand to 4 biocurators. I am an active member of the Gene Ontology Consortium, which is an international body funded by NHGRI, often leading working group discussions, such as one in 2011 that led to the expansion of GO to fully describe the process of cardiac electrophysiology.