Understanding time-course regulation of genes in response to a stimulus is a major concern in current systems biology. The problem is usually approached by computational methods to model the gene behaviour or its networked interactions with the others by a set of latent parameters. The model parameters can be estimated through a meta-analysis of available data obtained from other relevant experiments. The key question here is how to find the relevant experiments which are potentially useful in analysing current data. In this study, the authors address this problem in the context of time-course gene expression experiments from an information retrieval perspective. To this end, they introduce a computational framework that takes a time-course experiment as a query and reports a list of relevant experiments retrieved from a given repository. These retrieved experiments can then be used to associate the environmental factors of query experiment with the findings previously reported. The model is tested using a set of time-course Arabidopsis microarrays. The experimental results show that relevant experiments can be successfully retrieved based on content similarity.

It is proven that the model of the p53–mdm2 protein synthesis loop is a differentially flat one and using a diffeomorphism (change of state variables) that is proposed by differential flatness theory it is shown that the protein synthesis model can be transformed into the canonical (Brunovsky) form. This enables the design of a feedback control law that maintains the concentration of the p53 protein at the desirable levels. To estimate the non-measurable elements of the state vector describing the p53–mdm2 system dynamics, the derivative-free non-linear Kalman filter is used. Moreover, to compensate for modelling uncertainties and external disturbances that affect the p53–mdm2 system, the derivative-free non-linear Kalman filter is re-designed as a disturbance observer. The derivative-free non-linear Kalman filter consists of the Kalman filter recursion applied on the linearised equivalent of the protein synthesis model together with an inverse transformation based on differential flatness theory that enables to retrieve estimates for the state variables of the initial non-linear model. The proposed non-linear feedback control and perturbations compensation method for the p53–mdm2 system can result in more efficient chemotherapy schemes where the infusion of medication will be better administered.

A number of different gene selection approaches based on gene expression profiles (GEP) have been developed for tumour classification. A gene selection approach selects the most informative genes from the whole gene space, which is an important process for tumour classification using GEP. This study presents an improved swarm intelligent optimisation algorithm to select genes for maintaining the diversity of the population. The most essential characteristic of the proposed approach is that it can automatically determine the number of the selected genes. On the basis of the gene selection, the authors construct a variety of the tumour classifiers, including the ensemble classifiers. Four gene datasets are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The experimental results confirm that the proposed classifiers for tumour classification are indeed effective.

Many systems of interests in practices can be represented as complex networks. For biological systems, biomolecules do not perform their functions alone but interact with each other to form so-called biomolecular networks. A system is said to be controllable if it can be steered from any initial state to any other final state in finite time. The network controllability has become essential to study the dynamics of the networks and understand the importance of individual nodes in the networks. Some interesting biological phenomena have been discovered in terms of the structural controllability of biomolecular networks. Most of current studies investigate the structural controllability of networks in notion of the minimum driver node sets (MDSs). In this study, the authors analyse the network structural controllability in notion of the minimum steering node sets (MSSs). They first develop a graph-theoretic algorithm to identify the MSS for a given network and then apply it to several biomolecular networks. Application results show that biomolecules identified in the MSSs play essential roles in corresponding biological processes. Furthermore, the application results indicate that the MSSs can reflect the network dynamics and node importance in controlling the networks better than the MDSs.