I am a mathematician and my knowledge about biology is close to zero. I am reading a bioinformatics paper and I would like to understand a bit more about the biology task they are talking about. I cite here the first paragraph of the paper:
The identification of cell cycle-regulated genes through the cyclicity of messenger RNAs in genome-wide studies is a difficult task due to the presence of internal and external noise in microarray data. Moreover, the analysis is also complicated by the loss of synchrony occurring in cell cycle experiments, which often results in additional background noise.
[De Santis, Marianna, et al. "Combining optimization and machine learning techniques for genome-wide prediction of human cell cycle-regulated genes." Bioinformatics (2013): btt671.]
I've searched online for some explanation of this topic and I understand that cell-cycle is a set of events that cells go through for duplicating themselves. I also understand that there are some molecules that are responsible for the regulation of the cell cycle. I know that mRNA is a class of nucleic acid that is responsible for transferring the informations from the DNA inside the nucleus to the ribosomes in order begin the amino acids synthesis. Microarrays are matrices obtained by DNA sequences inside some chip.
What is the cyclicity of mRNA? How is it related to the cell cycle?
I just need a very simple explanation, without any detail, as it is not my field but I am concerned to understand the background.