GO:0043526 neuroprotection

[gocentral]

Stemming from the apoptosis project and discussed with some editors/curators:

GO:0043526 neuroprotection is_a GO:0043523 regulation of neuron apoptotic process (no other parents; no children). Currently defined as: "Any process that modulates the occurrence or rate of cell death by apoptosis in the nervous system. It may stop or prevent or reduce the rate of cell death by apoptosis and it is activated by stress to counteract death signals in central nervous systems. Different neuroprotective mechanisms may be activated to combat distinct types of cellular stress, ERK pathway is one of several neuroprotective mechanisms and it is a model system to study neuronal apoptosis, which may contribute to several neurodegenerative diseases and aging-related neuron loss."

Concerns are:

- In the literature, neuroprotection is an assay, or more than one assay; it doesn't really describe a process. It rather points to preventing a process from occurring.

• Within said assay context, neuroprotection is used in conjunction with 1) apoptotic processes, 2) non-apoptotic cell death modalities (or simply cell death where the death modality is not assessed or known), and 3) even non-death processes, such as related to increased or non-blocked neurogenesis, inflammation, and axonal degeneration. While it's true that general deterioration of neurons is often followed by their death, it's not always death that is assessed, and certainly not always bona fide apoptotic death. See e.g. PMID 16914673 (used by MGI to annotate Nmnat 1 and 3 to neuroprotection).
• Lastly, neuroprotection is referred to (and assayed on) non-neuronal cell types as well, such as astrocytes (glial cells). See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=neuroprotection%20astrocyte for a list.

GO:0043526 has 91 manual annotations, so it's not immediately visible if any of them are to non-neuronal cells. But even if they all referred to neurons, the concerns above still remain, so simply merging GO:0043526 into its parent GO:0043523 regulation of neuron apoptotic process wouldn't work. There is a more generic term for neuron death (GO:0070997), but again that wouldn't fully solve the question.

A reasonable strategy would be to look at the annotations and see if there aren't better terms that can be used for annotation. If there are better terms for annotation, then we should move the annotations and then obsolete the term.

I'm opening a ticket on the annotation SF tracker for curators to look into their annotations. I'll also add a definition comment to GO:0043526 neuroprotection as a warning that the term is up for obsoletion.

Thanks, Paola

Reported by: paolaroncaglia

Original Ticket: geneontology/ontology-requests/9626

[gocentral]

Link to annotation SF ticket: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3547952&group\_id=36855&atid=605890

Original comment by: paolaroncaglia

[gocentral]

All annotations looked at. Sent obsoletion email 2/8/2012.

Original comment by: paolaroncaglia

[gocentral]

Obsoleted GO:0043526 neuroprotection.

Original comment by: paolaroncaglia

[gocentral]

• status: open --> closed-fixed

Original comment by: paolaroncaglia