SimCT: a generic tool to visualize ontology-based relationships for biological objects.

Abstract

We present a web-based service, SimCT, which allows to graphically display the relationships between biological objects (e.g. genes or proteins) based on their annotations to a biomedical ontology. The result is presented as a tree of these objects, which can be viewed and explored through a specific java applet designed to highlight relevant features. Unlike the numerous tools that search for overrepresented terms, SimCT draws a simplified representation of biological terms present in the set of objects, and can be applied to any ontology for which annotation data is available. Being web-based, it does not require prior installation, and provides an intuitive, easy-to-use service. http://tagc.univ-mrs.fr/SimCT. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.