REVIGO Summarizes and Visualizes Long Lists of Gene Ontology Terms

The paper presents REVIGO, a web server that tackles a common problem in interpreting high-throughput biological experiments, which are typically analyzed by statistical testing for enriched functional categories defined by the Gene Ontology (GO). Because the resulting lists of GO terms can be large and highly redundant, they are difficult to interpret. REVIGO summarizes these lists by finding a representative subset of terms using a simple clustering algorithm that relies on semantic similarity measures.

Beyond summarization, REVIGO visualizes the non-redundant GO term set in multiple complementary ways to assist interpretation. Multidimensional scaling and graph-based visualizations accurately render the subdivisions and semantic relationships in the data, while treemaps and tag clouds are offered as alternative views. The tool is freely available as a web server, making otherwise unintelligible lists of GO terms easier for biologists to interpret.