Abstract: The goal of the GO Reference Genome Project, described in PMID 19578431, is to provide accurate, complete and consistent GO annotations for all genes in twelve model organism genomes.To this end, GO curators are annotating evolutionary trees from the PANTHER database with GO terms describing molecular function, biological process and cellular component. GO terms based on experimental data from the scientific literature are used to annotate ancestral genes in the phylogenetic tree by sequence similarity (ISS), and unannotated descendants of these ancestral genes are inferred to have inherited these same GO annotations by descent. The annotations are done using a tool called PAINT (Phylogenetic Annotation and INference Tool).