STRING: Functional enrichment analysis
string_enrichmentFind overrepresented biological functions for protein sets via STRING; single proteins expand to top interactors, and results report enriched terms with FDR.
Instructions
This tool retrieves functional enrichment for a set of proteins using STRING.
If queried with a single protein, the tool expands the query to include the protein’s 10 most likely interactors; enrichment is performed on this set, not the original single protein.
For two or more proteins, enrichment is performed on the exact input set.
When calling related tools, use the same input parameters unless otherwise specified.
Focus summaries on the top categories and most relevant terms for the results. Always report FDR for each claim.
Report FDR as a human-readable value (e.g. 2.3e-5 or 0.023).
IMPORTANT: Remember to suggest showing an enrichment graph for a specific category of user interest (e.g., GO, KEGG)
Very large responses are capped while preserving category diversity.
Use
expand_categoryto return only one category with expanded term coverage and per-term gene details.If a row has
preferredNames_omitted: true, do not infer which proteins are in that term from the returned rows. Usestring_functional_annotationwith the same proteins/species anddetail_for_termset to the exact term ID.
Output fields (per enriched term):
category: Term category (e.g., GO Process, KEGG pathway)
term: Enriched term (GO ID, domain, or pathway)
number_of_genes: Number of input genes with this term
number_of_genes_in_background: Number of background genes with this term
ncbiTaxonId: NCBI taxon ID
preferredNames: Canonical protein names, only when the full per-term list is short enough to show
proteinCount: Number of proteins matching this term
preferredNames_omitted: True when the gene list was omitted instead of showing a misleading partial list
p_value: Raw p-value
fdr: False Discovery Rate (B-H corrected p-value)
strength: Enrichment effect size, calculated as log10(observed genes / expected genes)
signal: Balanced enrichment-ranking metric combining the observed/expected ratio and -log(FDR)
description: Description of the enriched term
Response metadata:
input_gene_name_mapping: Only included when displayed gene lists contain submitted identifiers that differ from STRING preferred names.
category_summary: Total and returned term counts per category; use
expand_categoryfor categories wheretruncatedis true or where the user wants deeper category-specific detail.truncated_categories / omitted_categories: Categories with terms not shown in the current response.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| species | No | NCBI/STRING taxon (e.g. 9606 for human, or STRG0AXXXXX). Use only when required. | |
| proteins | Yes | One or more protein identifiers, separated by %0d. | |
| expand_category | No | Return only this enrichment category with expanded term coverage and a larger per-term gene-list cutoff. Use a category from metadata.category_summary. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
No arguments | |||