Computing continuous control laws for gene regulatory networks within a discrete-event systems approach

Abstract

Controlling the dynamics of intracellular networks has many important applications in Biotechnology and Medicine. In a previous work, we presented a method based on the Supervisory Control Theory to find a control law capable of guiding a given gene regulatory network from an initial state to some predefined target state. The controller was assumed to be implemented by synthetic genes. Our approach was entirely developed in the discrete-event domain. In this paper, we show that our ideas can also be employed to find continuous control laws for gene regulatory networks modeled by ordinary differential equations. Hence, we: a) enlarge the range of application of our initial ideas to encompass continuous models traditionally used by the Systems Biology community; and b) make it possible to refine the dynamic specifications of the synthetic genes that act as controllers.