Towards more biological mutation operators in gene regulation studies

Abstract

Genetic regulation is often viewed as a complex system whose properties emerge from the interaction of regulatory genes. One major paradigm for studying the complex dynamics of gene regulation uses directed graphs to explore structure, behaviour and evolvability. Mutation operators used in such studies typically involve the insertion and deletion of nodes, and the insertion, deletion and rewiring of links at the network level. These network-level mutational operators are sufficient to allow the statistical analysis of network structure, but impose limitations on the way networks are evolved. There are a wide variety of mutations in DNA sequences that have yet to be analysed for their network..