We previously reported the creation of a GO ribbon widget that provides a quick and interactive visual summary of the functions of a gene (7). The GO ribbon has been completely redesigned as a web component (Albou et al., in preparation) to facilitate the integration in any website independently of the framework used, and to suit the needs of several projects such as the Alliance of Genome Resources (8) and the next iteration of the UniProt platform. In addition to a 100-x fold increase in speed to load these visual summaries, the ribbon now accepts a new generic data model able to represent any kind of association data (e.g. gene – go term; gene – disease; gene – expression, etc.). Because of its speed, the ribbon can now handle gene sets of several hundred and up to a thousand genes, thus providing a useful and quick summary of functions for any list of genes. That functionality was used by the Alliance of Genome Resources to show the conservation and divergence of functions between orthologs of a gene (Figure 4).
