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Issue No.02 - April-June (2008 vol.5)
pp: 208-222
ABSTRACT
Analysis of the attractors of a genetic regulatory network gives a good indication of the possible functional modes of the system. In this paper we are concerned with the problem of finding all steady states of genetic regulatory networks described by piecewise-linear differential equation (PLDE) models. We show that the problem is NP-hard and translate it into a propositional satisfiability (SAT) problem. This allows the use of existing, efficient SAT solvers and has enabled the development of a steady state search module of the computer tool Genetic Network Analyzer (GNA). The practical use of this module is demonstrated by means of the analysis of a number of relatively small bacterial regulatory networks as well as randomly generated networks of several hundreds of genes.
INDEX TERMS
Genetic regulatory networks, piecewise-linear differential equations, steady states, SAT problem, large-scale systems
CITATION
Hidde de Jong, Michel Page, "Search for Steady States of Piecewise-Linear Differential Equation Models of Genetic Regulatory Networks", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, vol.5, no. 2, pp. 208-222, April-June 2008, doi:10.1109/TCBB.2007.70254
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