Description
Background
Multicellular organisms consist of cells of many different types that are established during development. Each type of cell is characterized by the unique combination of expressed gene products as a result of spatiotemporal gene regulation. Currently, a fundamental challenge in

Background
Multicellular organisms consist of cells of many different types that are established during development. Each type of cell is characterized by the unique combination of expressed gene products as a result of spatiotemporal gene regulation. Currently, a fundamental challenge in regulatory biology is to elucidate the gene expression controls that generate the complex body plans during development. Recent advances in high-throughput biotechnologies have generated spatiotemporal expression patterns for thousands of genes in the model organism fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Existing qualitative methods enhanced by a quantitative analysis based on computational tools we present in this paper would provide promising ways for addressing key scientific questions.
Results
We develop a set of computational methods and open source tools for identifying co-expressed embryonic domains and the associated genes simultaneously. To map the expression patterns of many genes into the same coordinate space and account for the embryonic shape variations, we develop a mesh generation method to deform a meshed generic ellipse to each individual embryo. We then develop a co-clustering formulation to cluster the genes and the mesh elements, thereby identifying co-expressed embryonic domains and the associated genes simultaneously. Experimental results indicate that the gene and mesh co-clusters can be correlated to key developmental events during the stages of embryogenesis we study. The open source software tool has been made available at http://compbio.cs.odu.edu/fly/.
Conclusions
Our mesh generation and machine learning methods and tools improve upon the flexibility, ease-of-use and accuracy of existing methods.
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    Title
    • A mesh generation and machine learning framework for Drosophilagene expression pattern image analysis
    Date Created
    2013-12-28
    Resource Type
  • Text
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    Identifier
    • Digital object identifier: 10.1186/1471-2105-14-372
    • Identifier Type
      International standard serial number
      Identifier Value
      1471-2105
    Note
    • The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2105-14-372

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    This is a suggested citation. Consult the appropriate style guide for specific citation guidelines.

    Zhang, W., Feng, D., Li, R., Chernikov, A., Chrisochoides, N., Osgood, C., . . . Ji, S. (2013). A mesh generation and machine learning framework for Drosophila gene expression pattern image analysis. BMC Bioinformatics, 14(1), 372. doi:10.1186/1471-2105-14-372

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