How Low Can You Go? BioEnactivism, Cognitive Biology and Umwelt Ontology

Evaluating Functional Annotations of Enzymes Using the Gene Ontology

The Gene Ontology (GO) (Ashburner et al., Nat Genet 25(1):25-29, 2000) is a powerful tool in the informatics arsenal of methods for evaluating annotations in a protein dataset. From identifying the nearest well annotated homologue of a protein of interest to predicting where misannotation has occurred to knowing how confident you can be in the annotations assigned to those proteins is critical....

How Cognizers Come to Know their World and What this Implies for Cognitive Robots

This paper points out some fundamental issues of particular relevance to the study of artificial cognitive development and the fabrication of cognizers (that is cognitive systems), notably: (a) the way a cognizer has access to its environment, (b) the fundamental difference between our (the scientist’s) models and those internal to a cognizer, (c) and the contingency of cognition. These are not...

O-35: How Can You Decrease the Complicationof Ovarian Diathermy in Polycystic OvarianSyndrome

Mutation Rates: How Low Can You Go?

Two recent reports combine mutation accumulation and whole-genome sequencing to measure mutation rates in microbes with unusual genome sizes and life cycles. The results are broadly consistent with the hypothesis that genetic drift plays a role in shaping genomic mutation rates across a wide range of taxa.

Assessing identity, redundancy and confounds in Gene Ontology annotations over time

MOTIVATION The Gene Ontology (GO) is heavily used in systems biology, but the potential for redundancy, confounds with other data sources and problems with stability over time have been little explored. RESULTS We report that GO annotations are stable over short periods, with 3% of genes not being most semantically similar to themselves between monthly GO editions. However, we find that genes...