The Cell Ontology is an
ontology
In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality.
Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...
that aims at capturing the diversity of
cell types
A cell type is a classification used to identify cells that share morphological or phenotypical features. A multicellular organism may contain cells of a number of widely differing and specialized cell types, such as muscle cells and skin cells, ...
in
animals
Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the biological kingdom Animalia. With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, are able to move, can reproduce sexually, and go through an ontogenetic stage in ...
. It is part of the
Open Biomedical and Biological Ontologies (OBO) Foundry. The Cell Ontology identifiers and organizational structure are used to annotate data at the level of cell types, for example in
single-cell RNA-seq studies. It is one important resource in the construction of the
Human Cell Atlas
The Human Cell Atlas is a project to describe all cell types in the human body. The initiative was announced by a consortium after its inaugural meeting in London in October 2016, which established the first phase of the project. Aviv Regev an ...
.
The Cell Ontology was first described in an
academic article
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or thesis, theses. The part of academic written output that is not forma ...
in 2005.
See also
*
Gene ontology
The Gene Ontology (GO) is a major bioinformatics initiative to unify the representation of gene and gene product attributes across all species. More specifically, the project aims to: 1) maintain and develop its controlled vocabulary of gene and g ...
*
OBO Foundry
The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry is a group of people dedicated to build and maintain ontologies related to the life sciences. The OBO Foundry establishes a set of principles for ontology development for creating a s ...
References
External Links
Cell Ontology GitHub page
Ontology (information science)
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