Bioinformatics or B101nformatics

For biologists using microarrays or sequencing one of the most intersting things is finding if a pathway related to a function is activated or not. To know if a pathway is activated or not usually we need to compare the same pathway in two conditions. It means a subject centered functional scoring method. Which in turns assumes that a pathway is conserved among people and time.   In addition the assumption that is done is that more expression of more genes of a pathways imply an increase of the metabolism of that pathway, which might not be true. Given that pathway has 5 genes, and that all of them are positive regulated implies that a pathway is activated? I have to dive to the origins of this, and see if there is some other way to measure how active a pathway is.

Until recently I didn't notice the changes on gene ontolology. For me it was a very reliable and stable resource. As my package BioCor is compared with GOSemSim which calculates similarities based on the gene ontologies I found that they change very much. There are constant changes on which terms are removed. I found that changes are shared via a github repository geneontology/go-announcements , which allows one to oppose to some changes.