Introduction:

1. The ‘syntax approach’ is an attempt to describe the locomotion of C. Elegans in terms of a vocabulary of ‘worm shapes’. 90 distinct postures are sufficient to account for 82% of postural variance.
2. This enables the use of methods developed for other kinds of discrete data in bioinformatics and language processing to be harnessed for the study of behavior.
3. The tools contained in the behavioral_syntax module are designed for desktop usage and it’s assumed that the data will be stored using a file system, not a database.

road map:

1. Build tools for analysis of discrete sequences(n-gram models, grammar inference algorithms…)
2. Analyse the effectiveness of these tools for phentoyping C. Elegans behavior.
3. Use effective tools for building phenotype classification algorithms.

list of supporting papers:

1. This is hard to summarize, but if I had to choose just one paper to read I would settle for the original Behavioral Syntax paper: http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004322