Revising Boolean Logical Models of Biological Regulatory Networks

Boolean regulatory networks are used to represent complex biological processes, modelling the interactions of biological compounds, such as proteins or genes, with each other and with other substances in a cell. Creating and maintaining computational models of these networks is crucial for comprehending corresponding cellular processes, as they allow reproducing known behaviours and testing new hypotheses and predictions in silico. In this context, model revision focuses on validating and (if necessary) repairing existing models based on new experimental data. However, model revision is commonly performed manually, which is inefficient and prone to error, and the few existing automated solutions either only apply to simpler networks or are limited in their revision process, since they may not be able to produce a solution within a reasonable time frame or miss the optimal solution. In this paper, we develop a solution for revising logical models of Boolean regulatory networks, able to find repairs that are consistent with provided, possibly incomplete experimental data, and minimal w.r.t. the differences to the original network. We show that our solution can be used to revise different real-world Boolean logical models very efficiently, surpassing a previous solution in terms of solved instances and with a considerable margin w.r.t. processing time.