MATHEMATICAL MODELING OF BIOLOGICAL NETWORK GOVERNING C ELEGANS VULVAL INDUCTI

Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

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Abstract

This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. C. elegans vulval development is a paradigmatic example of animal organogenesis with extensive experimental data. During vulval induction, each of the six multipotent vulval precursor cells (VPCs) commits to one of three fates (1[unreadable], 2[unreadable], 3[unreadable]). The precise 1[unreadable]-2[unreadable]-3[unreadable] formation of VPC fates is controlled by a network of intercellular signaling, intracellular signal transduction, and transcriptional regulation. The construction of mathematical models for this network will enable hypothesis generation, biological mechanism discovery, and system behavior analysis. A mathematical model can be developed to model the biological network that governs the VPC 1[unreadable]-2[unreadable]-3[unreadable] pattern formation process. We proposed to apply dynamic Bayesian network to model the causal relationship among network components. The problem is computationally intensive, we also propose to implement parallel algorithm to speed up the computation. The implementation of the mathematical modeling will be in C/C++ and MPI.