Property Preservation along Embedding of Biological Regulatory Networks

Abstract

In the course of understanding biological regulatory networks (BRN), scientists usually start by studying small BRNs that they believe to be of particular importance to represent a biological function, and then, embed them in the whole network. Such a reduction can lead to neglect relevant regulations and to study a network whose properties can be very different from the properties of this network viewed as a part of the whole. In this paper we study, from a logical point of view, the preservation of properties inherited from small BRNs. The signature of BRN, constituted by a graph, is one of the distinctive features on which embeddings can be defined which leads us to give a first condition on the subgraphs ensuring the preservation of properties of the embedded graphs.