GO enrichment - interpreting broad terms

Question

[jmah]

Hi all,

Looking at my GO enrichment analysis I see many very general terms eg. multicellular organismal process. How exactly does this get interpreted? Does this mean that the collection of proteins did not provide enough resolution to say that there was a more specific process going on?

From a list of enriched GO terms is it possible to extract only the ones closest to the leaf nodes? ie. weed out redundant terms that are closer to the root? Does anyone know a program that does that?

Thanks! Jasmine

[Chirag Parsania]

Recently I have developed a shiny app to cluster enriched GO terms which can help user to distinguish between GO involved in multiple phenomena and thus gene. You can access this from here

Answer 1

[Guangchuang Yu]

using simplify in clusterProfiler to remove redundancy and help interpretation of GO enrichment result.

[jmah]

Thanks for pointing this out!

Answer 2

[Chirag Parsania]

Use topGO , specifically designed to get more specific enriched terms and not general broas terms ~C.

[jmah]

Thanks! I will look into topGO. It sounds pretty close to what I'm interested in.