A novel gene network model based on nonlinear dynamics of asynchronous cellular automaton

Abstract

The gene affects various behaviors of animals such as circadian rhythm, courtship behavior, motor behavior, visual behavior, and learning. The circadian rhythm is a biological rhythm having a period of almost 24 hours, which is sometimes called internal clock or biological clock. In this paper, a gene network model based on the nonlinear dynamics of an asynchronous cellular automaton is proposed. It is shown that the proposed gene network model can reproduce circadian rhythms generated by one of the representative simplified ordinary differential equation gene network models. It is also shown that the proposed gene network model can be implemented in a field programmable gate array (ab. FPGA) with much less hardware resource compared to the ordinary differential equation gene network model. Hence, the results of this paper will contribute to develop a hardware-based large scale gene network simulator the applications of which include a hardware-based genomic drug discovery (e.g., special hardware to execute simulations of large scale gene networks for drug discovery).