Identification of gene regulatory networks by strategic gene disruptions and gene overexpressions

A hot research topic in Genome Science is to analyze the interactions between genes by systematic gene disruptions and gene overexpressions. This paper analyzes the problem of identifying a gene regulatory network from data obtained by multiple gene disruptions and overexpressions in regard to the number of experiments and the complexity of experiments. An experiment consists of a parallel gene disruptions and overexpressions and the complexity of an experiment is the number of genes disrupted or overexpressed. We define a gene regulatory network as a boolean network and show a series of algorithms which describe methods for identifying the underlying gene regulatory network by such experiments. Some lower bounds on the number of experiments required for the identification are also proved for some cases.