Uberon

Uberon is a comprehensive, multi-species ontology that represents a variety of anatomical entities. The ontology is applicable to all animals and is developed by the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry. Uberon covers anatomical structures in animals from a variety of species, including humans. It integrates multiple existing species-specific anatomical ontologies, like the Foundational Model of Anatomy, into a single, unified resource.

Overview[edit | edit source]

Uberon is a computational model of the shared anatomical structures of different animals. It is designed to support information retrieval and integration among a wide range of biological databases. Uberon provides a common mapping across species-specific anatomical ontologies, allowing for integrative and comparative analyses.

Structure[edit | edit source]

Uberon is structured as a directed acyclic graph, where each node represents a class of anatomical entities, and the edges represent relationships between these classes. The ontology includes a variety of relationship types, including part-of, develops-from, and homologous-to.

Applications[edit | edit source]

Uberon is used in a variety of biological and biomedical databases. It is used to annotate and integrate data across a wide range of species, facilitating comparative analysis. Uberon is also used in the annotation of phenotypic data, and it has been used to generate hypotheses about gene function based on the anatomical locations of gene expression.