Using Boolean networks to model post-transcriptional regulation in gene regulatory networks

Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) model some of the mechanisms that regulate gene expression. Among the computational approaches available to model and study GNRs, Boolean network (BN) emerged as very successful to better understand both the structural and dynamical properties of GRNs. Nevertheless, the most widely used models based on BNs do not include any post-transcriptional regulation mechanism. Since miRNAs have been proved to play an important regulatory role, in this paper we show how the post-transcriptional regulation mechanism mediated by miRNAs has been included in an enhanced BN-based model. We resort to the miR-7 in two Drosophila cell fate determination networks to verify the effectiveness of miRNAs modeling in BNs, by implementing it in our tool for the analysis of Boolean networks.