title: Putative synaptic genes defined from a Drosophila whole body developmental transcriptome by a machine learning approach.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Assembly and function of neuronal synapses require the coordinated expression of a yet undetermined set of genes. Although roughly a thousand genes are expected to be important for this function in Drosophila melanogaster, just a few hundreds of them are known so far.
  
  
  RESULTS
  In this work we trained three learning algorithms to predict a "synaptic function" for genes of Drosophila using data from a whole-body developmental transcriptome published by others. Using statistical and biological criteria to analyze and combine the predictions, we obtained a gene catalogue that is highly enriched in genes of relevance for Drosophila synapse assembly and function but still not recognized as such.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The utility of our approach is that it reduces the number of genes to be tested through hypothesis-driven experimentation.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Biología del Neurodesarrollo, Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas Clemente Estable, Avenida Italia 3318, PC 11600, Montevideo, Uruguay. fpazos@iibce.edu.uy.
authors.forename: Flavio
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Pazos Obregón
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Matemática y Estadística "Prof. Ing. Rafael Laguardia", Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay. cpapalardo@fing.edu.uy.
authors.forename: Cecilia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Papalardo
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Matemática y Estadística "Prof. Ing. Rafael Laguardia", Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay. scastro@fing.edu.uy.
authors.forename: Sebastián
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Castro
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Matemática y Estadística "Prof. Ing. Rafael Laguardia", Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay. gguerber@fing.edu.uy.
authors.forename: Gustavo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Guerberoff
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Biología del Neurodesarrollo, Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas Clemente Estable, Avenida Italia 3318, PC 11600, Montevideo, Uruguay. Rafael.Cantera@zoologi.su.se.|Zoology Department, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. Rafael.Cantera@zoologi.su.se.
authors.forename: Rafael
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Cantera
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D019295:Computational Biology; D066264:Datasets as Topic; D004330:Drosophila / Q000196:embryology* / Q000235:genetics*; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D018507:Gene Expression Regulation, Developmental; D006801:Humans; D000069550:Machine Learning; D008954:Models, Biological; D009928:Organ Specificity / Q000235:genetics; D051381:Rats; D013569:Synapses / Q000235:genetics* / Q000378:metabolism; D059467:Transcriptome