The GO Consortium (http://www.geneontology.org) has developed a systematic and standardized nomenclature to annotate genes in various organisms, including P. falciparum. The Gene Ontology is actually composed of three main ontologies: Molecular Function, Biological Process, and Cellular Component. Each ontology is a directed acyclic graph describing generalization relationships between hundreds of terms. The most general term is at the top of the ontology, while the bottom terms are the most specific ones. A gene may be annotated with several GO terms. Moreover, due to the generalization relationship, if a gene is annotated with a term t, then it is also annotated with all upper terms that generalize t.
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