Reverse inference in symbolic systems biology

Abstract

Cell dynamics is intrinsically concurrent, since many different biochemical reactions might take place simultaneously in a cell. Productive symbolic mathematical models of cell biology can be developed by modeling such biochemical reactions with rewrite rules. Analyses and predictions of biological facts can be obtained from such models. The authors have previously published several approaches for searching along cellular signaling networks. In this paper, we introduce a novel reverse inference system by applying narrowing techniques. Moreover, we propose a new general architecture which allows an extendible set of tools for direct and reverse inference by using rewriting logic.