Blast2GO, first published in 2005,[1][2][3][4] is a bioinformatics software tool for the automatic, high-throughput functional annotation of novel sequence data (genesproteins). It makes use of the BLAST[5] algorithm to identify similar sequences to then transfers existing functional annotation from yet characterised sequences to the novel one. The functional information is represented via the Gene Ontology (GO), a controlled vocabulary of functional attributes.[citation needed] The Gene Ontology, or GO, is a major bioinformatics initiative to unify the representation of gene and gene product attributes across all species.[6]