Evolving genetic regulatory networks for systems biology

Abstract

Recently there has been significant interest in evolving genetic regulatory networks with a user-determined behaviour. It is unclear whether or not artificial evolution of biochemical networks can be of direct benefit for or biological relevance to Systems Biology. This article highlights some pitfalls when concluding from artificially evolved genetic regulatory networks to real networks. This article also gives a (brief) review of some previous attempts to evolve genetic regulatory networks with oscillatory behaviour; it also describes a new system to evolve networks and describes the networks that have been evolved. These networks seem to be very diverse sharing no apparent common motifs either with one another or with their real-life counterparts. © 2007 IEEE.