Bioinformatic techniques in Drosophila circadian biology: An interdisciplinary approach to gene discovery and behavior analysis of the circadian clock of Drosophila melanogaster.

摘要

Drosophila melanogaster has long been utilized as a means to obtain understanding of the circadian clock. While a great deal is known with respect to the core elements of this biological timing mechanism, relatively little is known about the various afferent pathways that allow it to respond to changes in the environment, and the efferent pathways through which it is able to effect regulation of the biomolecular and eventual behavioral outputs of the circadian clock. The discovery of genes that function in these pathways is critical to placing current knowledge of the core clock mechanism in its biological context, as the central hub of an extremely complex signaling network that regulates an enormous amount of animal behavior. Two bioinformatic approaches are presented as a means to facilitate such discovery. One focuses on analysis of microarray data to indentify transcripts that exhibit cyclic expression, a hallmark of many currently known circadian genes (Chapters 1-3). The second presents a computational tool that can be used to greatly improve the throughput of screens that seek to identify novel circadian mutants through the automated characterization of their behavior (Chapter 4).