RedundancyMiner: De-replication of redundant GO categories in microarray and proteomics analysis

Background The Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium organizes genes into hierarchical categories based on biological process, molecular function and subcellular localization. Tools such as GoMiner can leverage GO to perform ontological analysis of microarray and proteomics studies, typically generating a list of significant functional categories. Two or more of the categories are often redundant, in the sense that identical or nearly-identical sets of genes map to the categories. The redundancy might typically inflate the report of significant categories by a factor of three-fold, create an illusion of an overly long list of significant categories, and obscure the relevant biological interpretation.