Modelling gene and protein regulatory networks with answer set programming

摘要

Recently, many approaches to model regulatory networks have been proposed in the systems biology domain. However, the task is far from being solved. In this paper, we propose an Answer Set Programming (ASP)-based approach to model interaction networks. We build a general ASP framework that describes the network semantics and allows modelling specific networks with little effort. ASP provides a rich and flexible toolbox that allows expanding the framework with desired features. In this paper, we tune our framework to mimic Boolean network behaviour and apply it to model the Budding Yeast and Fission Yeast cell cycle networks. The obtained steady states of these networks correspond to those of the Boolean networks.