'Deliciously Cut-Throat' Annotations

The Community Assessment of Community Annotation with Ontologies, or CACAO, is "an annotation competition and educational effort" to get students interested in genetics and the analysis of genes, says Iddo Freidberg at Byte Size Biology. The project, which is run by researchers at Texas A&M University, pits teams of students from around the world against each other. Each team gets assigned a set of genes and has to employ any and all means to look them up and annotate them correctly. The scoring system, Friedberg says, is "deliciously cut-throat" as each team posts its results and then looks for errors in other teams' annotations — if team B find errors in team A's work, team B gets all of team A's points, Friedberg says. The researchers who run the competition are looking for students interesting in competing in the spring semester, he adds.