Abstract
We describe a simulation of multi-genic heterosis using Boolean gene regulatory networks. Hybrid vigor, or heterosis, is the phenomenon whereby the offspring of crosses from separate populations often perform better than inbreds with respect to growth rate, fertility and disease resistance. Because of its great economic importance, the genetic and molecular basis of heterosis has been subject of many scientific studies. However, attempts to model the phenomenon from a systems biology point of view have been quite abstract.
Our model allows the generation, evolution, homologous recombination and hybridisation of networks which display the properties of gene regulatory networks observed in biology in a simulated environment. We can thus test the current hypotheses about heterosis and investigate which factors affect it.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Goff, S.A.: A unifying theory for general multigenic heterosis: energy efficiency, protein metabolism, and implications for molecular breeding. New Phytol. 189, 923–937 (2011)
Birchler, J.A., Yao, H., Chudalayandi, S., Vaiman, D., Veitia, R.A.: Heterosis. The Plant Cell 22, 2105–2112 (2010)
Brummitt, C.: Network Model of Heterosis ECS289L Project Report (2011)
Andorf, S.: Molecular network structures in heterozygotes: A systems-biology approach to heterosis. J. Bioinform. Syst. Biol. (2009)
Kauffman, S.A.: Metabolic stability and epigenesis in randomly constructed genetic nets. J. Theor. Biol. 22, 437–467 (1969)
Schlitt, T., Brazma, A.: Current approaches to gene regulatory network modelling. BMC Bioinformatics 8, S9 (2007)
Holme, P., Kim, B.J.: Growing scale-free networks with tunable clustering. Phys. Rev. E Stat. Nonlin. Soft Matter Phys. 65, 026107 (2002)
Müssel, C., Hopfensitz, M., Kestler, H.A.: BoolNet–an R package for generation, reconstruction and analysis of Boolean networks. Bioinformatics 26, 1378–1380 (2010)
Teichmann, S.A., Babu, M.M.: Gene regulatory network growth by duplication. Nature Genetics 36, 492–496 (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Emmrich, P.M.F., Roberts, H.E., Pancaldi, V. (2012). A Gene Regulatory Network Simulation of Heterosis. In: Lones, M.A., Smith, S.L., Teichmann, S., Naef, F., Walker, J.A., Trefzer, M.A. (eds) Information Processign in Cells and Tissues. IPCAT 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7223. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28792-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28792-3_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-28791-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-28792-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)