Design of a dynamic model of genes with multiple autonomous regulatory modules by evolutionary computations

Holloway, David (David Holloway (David_Holloway)) (author)
Spirov, Alexander, V. (author)
(editor)
(translator)

Copyright © 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V.

A new approach to design a dynamic model of genes with multiple autonomous regulatory modules by evolutionary computations is proposed. The approach is based on Genetic Algorithms (GA), with new crossover operators especially designed for these purposes. The new operators use local homology between parental strings to preserve building blocks found by the algorithm. The approach exploits the subbasin-portal architecture of the fitness functions suitable for this kind of evolutionary modeling. This architecture is significant for Royal Road class fitness functions. Two real-life Systems Biology problems with such fitness functions are implemented here: evolution of the bacterial promoter rrnP1 and of the enhancer of the Drosophila even-skipped gene. The effectiveness of the approach compared to standard GA is demonstrated on several benchmark and reallife tasks.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050910001122