A Petri Net model to simulate and analyse cerebral folate deficiency and hyperhomocysteinemia effects in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is one of the most popular disorders. Many researches and experiments in the world have been conducted to study causes of ASD. It has been proved that ASD is associated with elevated concentrations of homocysteine and low concentrations of cerebral folic acid. Being part of a complex biological system, we can model it to study its behaviour relatively to metabolic causes of ASD and predict the deregulations earlier. We use, in this work, a Petri net extension, called HFPN, in order to model a complex system related to metabolic biological causes of ASD and to analyse effects of some enzymes and metabolites in ASD.