IET Systems Biology

Aberrant gene functions usually contribute to the pathology or diseases. Avoiding undesirable cellular phenotypes as many as possible is a major purpose of external control for gene regulatory networks. An interesting question is how to control a gene network subjected to the condition that the genes reach some undesirable states with minimal probability during a cell cycle. In this paper, we make... View full abstract»

The limited amount of quantitative experimental data generated from life-science experiments poses a major challenge in systems biology. The reason for this is that many systems approaches, such as parameter estimation, simulation and sensitivity analysis make use of models or analyse quantitative data. However, these techniques are only of limited use if only qualitative or semi-quantitative info... View full abstract»

One of the most challenging tasks in systems biology is parameter identification from experimental data. In particular, if the available data are noisy, the resulting parameter uncertainty can be huge and should be quantified. In this work, a set-based approach for parameter identification in discrete time models of biochemical reaction networks from time series data is developed. The basic idea i... View full abstract»

Gene expression is regulated by transcription factor activity, which can be extremely difficult to measure directly. Previous work has established a method to extract the `hidden` transcription factor activity profile from microarray data and use it to effectively identify genes that are targets of a single transcription factor. However, most genes are regulated by two or more transcription factor... View full abstract»

With the increased availability of DNA microarray time-series data, it is possible to discover dynamic gene regulatory networks (GRNs). S-system is a promising model to capture the rich dynamics of GRNs. However, owing to the complexity of the inference problem and limited number of available data comparing to the number of unknown kinetic parameters, S-system can only be applied to a very small G... View full abstract»

In this study, the authors investigated how the glycolytic flux was regulated in time upon nitrogen starvation of cells with different growth histories. We have compared cells grown in glucose-limited chemostat cultures under respiratory conditions (low dilution rate of 0.1/h) to cells grown under respirofermentative conditions (high dilution rate of 0.35/h). The fermentative capacity was lower in... View full abstract»

Continuous and Boolean models for the Drosophila segment polarity network have shown that the system is able to maintain the wild-type pattern when subjected to sustained changes in the interaction parameters and initial conditions. Embryo development is likely to occur under fluctuating environmental conditions. Here, a well-established Boolean model is used to explore the ability of the s... View full abstract»