QuickGO Database

Overview

QuickGO is the EBI's Gene Ontology annotation browser and REST API. It provides programmatic access to the GO ontology (terms, synonyms, hierarchies) and to the manually curated and electronic GO annotations for proteins across all species. The API is free, requires no authentication, and returns JSON responses. All endpoints live under https://www.ebi.ac.uk/QuickGO/services/.

When to Use

• Resolving a GO term ID (e.g., GO:0006915) to its name, definition, and aspect (biological_process, molecular_function, cellular_component)
• Retrieving all GO annotations for a UniProt protein, filtered by evidence code and taxon
• Searching GO terms by keyword (e.g., "apoptosis") to find relevant term IDs before enrichment analysis
• Walking the GO DAG upward (ancestors) or downward (descendants) from a specific term
• Getting annotation counts stratified by evidence code or GO aspect for a set of proteins
• Resolving multiple GO IDs in one batch request to avoid looping over individual term lookups
• For enrichment analysis (ORA/GSEA) on a gene list use gseapy-gene-enrichment; QuickGO provides the raw annotation data
• For comprehensive protein function annotations in Swiss-Prot format use uniprot-protein-database

Prerequisites