New Drosophila Long-Term Memory Genes Revealed by Assessing Computational Function Prediction Methods

G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics

Sean D. Mooney^4¹  Naihui Zhou^3²  Stephen Barton^1³  Balint Z. Kacsoh^1⁴  Iddo Friedberg^3⁵  Yuxiang Jiang^2⁶ 

[1] College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA^5;Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, University of Washington, Seattle, WA^4;Department of Computer Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN^2;Department of Molecular and Systems Biology, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Hanover, NH, 03755, USA^1;Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, PA, 19104^6;Department of Veterinary Microbiology and Preventive Medicine, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011^3

关键词: D . melanogaster;    Parasitoid wasp;    Learning and memory;    Long-term memory;    Behavior;    Bioinformatics;    Gene function prediction;    Critical assessment;   

DOI  :  10.1534/g3.118.200867

学科分类：生物科学（综合）

来源: Genetics Society of America

【 摘 要 】

A major bottleneck to our understanding of the genetic and molecular foundation of life lies in the ability to assign function to a gene and, subsequently, a protein. Traditional molecular and genetic experiments can provide the most reliable forms of identification, but are generally low-throughput, making such discovery and assignment a daunting task. The bottleneck has led to an increasing role for computational approaches. The Critical Assessment of Functional Annotation (CAFA) effort seeks to measure the performance of computational methods. In CAFA3, we performed selected screens, including an effort focused on long-term memory. We used homology and previous CAFA predictions to identify 29 key Drosophila genes, which we tested via a long-term memory screen. We identify 11 novel genes that are involved in long-term memory formation and show a high level of connectivity with previously identified learning and memory genes. Our study provides first higher-order behavioral assay and organism screen used for CAFA assessments and revealed previously uncharacterized roles of multiple genes as possible regulators of neuronal plasticity at the boundary of information acquisition and memory formation.

【 授权许可】

CC BY