Intervention in biological phenomena modeled by S-systems: A model predictive control approach

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed extensive research activity in modeling genetic regulatory networks (GRNs) as well as in developing therapeutic intervention strategies for such networks. S-systems, which offer a good compromise between accuracy and mathematical flexibility, are a promising framework for modeling the dynamical behavior of GRNs, as well as that of biochemical pathways. In this paper, an intervention strategy is proposed for the S-system model. In this approach, a model predictive control algorithm is developed which guides the target variables to their desired values. The proposed intervention strategy is applied to the glycolytic-glycogenolytic pathway as well as a generic branched pathway and the simulation results presented demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.