The ChEBI ontology, another major building block of GO, defines roles chemicals may have, e.g. ‘drug’ and ‘hormone’. GO, on the other hand, requires that the descendant of a term be universally true. This difference in practice resulted in incorrect logical inferences with respect to GO practices for a few specific cases, e.g. ‘ATP binding’ is not always a type of ‘drug binding’. Since ChEBI roles cannot always reliably be used to make inferences that are true in all contexts, they will no longer be used to make inferences about relationships between GO terms within the ontology.
