Building Synthetic Networks of the Budding Yeast Cell-Cycle Using Swarm Intelligence

A swarm intelligence technique called the bees algorithm is formulated to build synthetic networks of the budding yeast cell-cycle. The resulting networks contain the original fixed points of the budding yeast cell-cycle network plus additional fixed points to reduce the basin size of the fixed point associated to the G1 phase of the cell-cycle, with the purpose of promoting cell proliferation for biotechnological applications. One thousand synthetic networks were found using the bees algorithm, 84.5% had basins size for the G1 fixed point less or equal to 10, whereas the original model has a basin size for that fixed point of 1764. One of the synthetic networks was analyzed by a biologist concluding that the resulting model was quite consistent from a biological point of view, supporting the proposed method as a tool for biologist to construct synthetic networks with desired characteristics.