MGI is a member of the Gene Ontology Consortium Reference Genome Annotation Project with the responsibility of comprehensively annotating a selected set of mouse genes.

With more and more genomes being sequenced, we are in the middle of an explosion of genomic information. The limited resources to manually annotate the growing number of sequenced genomes imply that automatic annotation will be the method of choice for many groups. The GO Consortium coordinates an effort to maximize and optimize the GO annotation of a large and representative set of key genomes known as reference genomes. The goal of this project is to completely annotate twelve reference genomes so that those annotations may be used to effectively seed the automatic annotation efforts of other genomes.