Towards Application of the RBNK Model
This work addresses the behavior of abstract genetic regulatory networks for researchers in computational biology, but it is incremental as it builds on existing models without introducing new paradigms.
The paper investigates how a well-known genetic regulatory network model responds to environmental changes on tunable fitness landscapes, exploring effects on genome size and gene connectivity.
The computational modeling of genetic regulatory networks is now common place, either by fitting a system to experimental data or by exploring the behaviour of abstract systems with the aim of identifying underlying principles. This paper presents an approach to the latter, considering the response to environmental changes of a well-known model placed upon tunable fitness landscapes. The effects on genome size and gene connectivity are explored.