MP Modelling for Systems Biology: Two Case Studies

Metabolic P systems (MP systems), based on Paun’s P systems, were introducedfor modelling metabolic systems by means of suitable multiset rewriting grammars. The initial modelling framework has been widely extended in last years and equipped with a new regression algorithm which derives MP models from the time series of observed dynamics. This has allowed us to dramatically extend the range of possible MP modelling applications from metabolic dynamics to more general kinds of dynamical systems. In this work two applications of MP systems are presented, for discovering the internal regulation logic of two phenomena relevant to systems biology. The first one is a metabolic dynamics related to glucose/insulin interactions during the Intravenous Glucose Tolerance Test. The second one deals with the definition of gene expression networks related to breast cancer under the inhibition of a growth factor.