Modeling genetic networks: Comparison of static and dynamic models

Abstract

Biomedical research has been revolutionized by high-throughput techniques and the enormous amount of biological data they are able to generate. The interest shown over network models and systems biology is rapidly raising. Genetic networks arise as an essential task to mine these data since they explain the function of genes in terms of how they influence other genes. Many modeling approaches have been proposed for building genetic networks up. However, it is not clear what the advantages and disadvantages of each model are. There are several ways to discriminate network building models, being one of the most important whether the data being mined presents a static or dynamic fashion. In this work we compare static and dynamic models over a problem related to the inflammation and the host response to injury. We show how both models provide complementary information and cross-validate the obtained results. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.