Towards an evolutionary procedure for reverse-engineering biological networks

Metabolic P systems are a modeling framework for metabolic, regulatory and signaling processes. The synthesis of flux regulation functions from time series of substance concentrations is a key task for reverse-engineering biological systems by MP systems. In this paper we present some important improvements to a technique based on genetic algorithms and multiple linear regression for the synthesis of regulation functions. An accurate analysis of generated functions, for the case study of the mitotic oscillator in early amphibian embryos, shows that some knowledge about the regulation mechanisms of biological processes can be inferred from experimental data using this methodology.