UBERON

UBERON is a cross-species anatomy ontology that integrates anatomical structures across vertebrate species to support cross-species data annotation and analysis. It is part of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry and serves as a unifying reference for comparing anatomical information across species.

UBERON combines terms from species-specific anatomical ontologies (such as mouse and human) into a unified hierarchy, linked by relations such as is_a and part_of. It provides cross-references to external ontologies and databases, enabling interoperability and alignment with developmental and physiological data. The ontology covers organs, tissues, and body parts common to vertebrates, with explicit mappings to model organism atlases and human anatomy resources. This cross-species approach supports comparative genomics, phenotyping, and translational research by enabling equivalent terms across species.

UBERON is widely used to annotate gene expression, phenotypes, and other data across species; researchers can compare anatomy-related data from different organisms using a common terminology. It supports workflows in data integration, mining, and analysis where cross-species anatomical correspondence is essential.

UBERON is available in OWL and OBO formats and is publicly accessible via the OBO Foundry, the European Bioinformatics Institute’s Ontology Lookup Service, and related resources. It is maintained by a collaborative community of researchers and updated regularly to reflect new scientific knowledge and cross-references to other anatomical resources.

As a reference framework, Uberon complements species-specific anatomy ontologies and serves as a backbone for data integration in anatomy-related databases, literature mining, and bioinformatics pipelines.