Genetic Regulatory Networks

Abstract

It has been observed that much of the diversity in the natural world can be traced to three features of developmental biology, namely, interactions between gene products, the temporal nature of gene expression, and shifts in the location of gene expression [32]. The first item highlights the significance of feedback loops in developmental processes. In terms of developmental approaches adopted in Natural Computing, it is those algorithms which implement genetic regulatory networks (GRN) that capture the first two of these features (i.e., feedback loops regulating gene expression, and the temporal nature of gene expression). Much of the literature to date in the area of GRN algorithms represents attempts to examine GRN variants and tries to understand how they might operate [33, 249, 294, 364]. In this chapter we describe GRNs and outline examples of some of their practical uses including their potential as an approach for genetic programming [426, 449] and for image compression [629].