Learning Boolean Controls in Regulated Metabolic Networks: A Case-Study

Abstract

Many techniques have been developed to infer Boolean regulations from a prior knowledge network and experimental data. Existing methods are able to reverse-engineer Boolean regulations for transcriptional and signaling networks, but they fail to infer regulations that control metabolic networks. This paper provides a formalisation of the inference of regulations for metabolic networks as a satisfiability problem with two levels of quantifiers, and introduces a method based on Answer Set Programming to solve this problem on a small-scale example.