rrvgo: a Bioconductor package for interpreting lists of Gene Ontology terms

Gene Ontology (GO) annotation is often used to guide the biological interpretation of high-throughput omics experiments, e.g. by analysing lists of differentially regulated genes for enriched GO terms. Due to the hierarchical nature of GOs, the resulting lists of enriched terms are usually redundant and difficult to summarise and interpret. To facilitate the interpretation of large lists of GO terms, I developed rrvgo, a Bioconductor package that aims at simplifying the redundancy of GO lists by grouping similar terms based on their semantic similarity. rrvgo also provides different visualization options to guide the interpretation of the summarized GO terms. Considering that several software tools have been developed for this purpose, rrvgo is unique at combining powerful visualizations in a programmatic interface coupled with up-to-date GO gene annotation provided by the Bioconductor project.