An ontology for cell types

Jonathan Bard¹ , Seung Y Rhee² and Michael Ashburner³^,4

¹Department of Biomedical Sciences, Hugh Robson Building, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH8 9XD, UK

²Department of Plant Biology, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Stanford, CA 93405, USA

³Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EH, UK

⁴EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SD, UK

author email corresponding author email

Genome Biology 2005, 6:R21doi:10.1186/gb-2005-6-2-r21


Published:	14 January 2005

Subject areas: Bioinformatics, Cell biology, Genome studies

Abstract

We describe an ontology for cell types that covers the prokaryotic, fungal, animal and plant worlds. It includes over 680 cell types. These cell types are classified under several generic categories and are organized as a directed acyclic graph. The ontology is available in the formats adopted by the Open Biological Ontologies umbrella and is designed to be used in the context of model organism genome and other biological databases. The ontology is freely available at http://obo.sourceforge.net/ webcite and can be viewed using standard ontology visualization tools such as OBO-Edit and COBrA.