Gene Ontology (GO) terms are derived from dynamic controlled vocabularies, or ontologies, produced by the Gene Ontology Consortium to describe the roles of genes and gene products in all organisms.

The Gene Ontology Consortium has developed and continues to expand ontologies of terms that define the molecular functions, biological processes, and cellular components:

• Molecular Function: Terms that describe a gene product function at a biochemical level.
• Biological Process: Pathways and larger processes accomplished by ordered assemblies of molecular functions.
• Cellular Component: Subcellular structures and macromolecular complexes in the cell where a gene product is active.

GO annotations consist at minimum of the gene product, the GO term, an evidence code , and a reference.

The GO annotations in ZFIN come from multiple sources including expert curation of the published literature, as well as automated processes which predict GO terms based on various attributes of gene products.

The ribbon view lists high-level terms from each aspect. Clicking on a colored cell will open the corresponding more detailed view of the annotations. Unfilled boxes in the ribbon indicate that there are no annotations currently available in ZFIN. An unfilled box does not imply the absence of involvement of the gene products in the function, biological process and cellular component terms listed in the ribbon.

ZFIN began including GO annotations in 2003.

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