Section: New Results

Automated Inference of Boolean models from molecular interaction maps

Participant : Sylvain Soliman.

Molecular interaction maps have emerged as a meaningful way of representing biological mechanisms in a comprehensive and systematic manner. However, their static nature provides limited insights to the emerging behavior of the described biological system under different conditions. Computational modeling provides the means to study dynamic properties through in silico simulations and perturbations.

In collaboration with Anna Niarakis (Université d'Évry, GenHotel) we have started developing the CaSQ Python package, by defining simplification rules and logical formulas for the inferred Boolean models according to the topology and the annotations of the starting molecular interaction maps. We used CaSQ to produce executable files of existing molecular maps notably a big map of the Rheumatoid Arthritis that is at the core of Évry team's work.

A publication on the inference process has already been submitted to Bioinformatics but work continues on the applications side to fine-tune the automatically generated model and analyze its dynamical properties.