Neurobehavior Ontology (NBO)
Overview
The Neurobehavior Ontology is an OBO Foundry ontology providing a controlled vocabulary for the description of behavioural and neurological phenotypes in both humans and model organisms. It is designed to be used in conjunction with HPO for human phenotypic abnormalities and the Mammalian Phenotype Ontology (MP) for model organism phenotypes, and integrates with UBERON for anatomical localisation of behavioural functions.
Coverage and Use
NBO covers the following domains (examples of terms given for each):
- Motor behaviours: locomotion, gait, balance, tremor
- Cognitive behaviours: learning, memory, attention, executive function
- Sensory behaviours: pain sensitivity, olfaction, vision
- Social and affective behaviours: anxiety, social interaction, aggression, reward
- Sleep and circadian behaviours
These terms are used to annotate behavioural data from preclinical phenotyping platforms, to standardise assessment descriptions across multisite clinical cohort studies, and to enable cross-species comparison by bridging human clinical terms with model organism phenotype descriptions.
Connections
- Part of: OBO Foundry
- Aligns with: HPO (human phenotype abnormalities), UBERON (anatomical localisation)