Research

Inverse bifurcation analysis: application to simple gene systems

James Lu¹ , Heinz W Engl¹ and Peter Schuster²

¹  Johann Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Altenbergerstrasse 69, A-4040 Linz, Austria

²  Theoretical Biochemistry Group, Institute for Theoretical Chemistry, University of Vienna, Währingerstrasse 17, A-1090 Vienna, Austria

author email corresponding author email

Algorithms for Molecular Biology 2006, 1:11doi:10.1186/1748-7188-1-11

Published:	21 July 2006

Abstract

Background

Bifurcation analysis has proven to be a powerful method for understanding the qualitative behavior of gene regulatory networks. In addition to the more traditional forward problem of determining the mapping from parameter space to the space of model behavior, the inverse problem of determining model parameters to result in certain desired properties of the bifurcation diagram provides an attractive methodology for addressing important biological problems. These include understanding how the robustness of qualitative behavior arises from system design as well as providing a way to engineer biological networks with qualitative properties.

Results

We demonstrate that certain inverse bifurcation problems of biological interest may be cast as optimization problems involving minimal distances of reference parameter sets to bifurcation manifolds. This formulation allows for an iterative solution procedure based on performing a sequence of eigen-system computations and one-parameter continuations of solutions, the latter being a standard capability in existing numerical bifurcation software. As applications of the proposed method, we show that the problem of maximizing regions of a given qualitative behavior as well as the reverse engineering of bistable gene switches can be modelled and efficiently solved.