Table 1 Example depth five biological process GO terms. GO term depth is a commonly used metric for biological specificity in the Gene Ontology. 5 of the smallest depth 5 GO terms and 4 of the largest depth 5 GO terms are listed above. The processes described range from very specific behaviors (e.g. contractile ring contraction) to less informative groupings (e.g. cellular protein metabolism), suggesting depth is a poor measure of specificity. The size distribution for all depth 5 GO terms is plotted in Fig. 3.

From: Finding function: evaluation methods for functional genomic data