The first comprehensive treatment of probabilistic Boolean networks, unifying different strands of current research and addressing emerging issues.

This is the first comprehensive treatment of probabilistic Boolean networks (PBNs), an important model class for studying genetic regulatory networks. This book covers basic model properties, including the relationships between network structure and dynamics, steady-state analysis, and relationships to other model classes." "Researchers in mathematics, computer science, and engineering are exposed to important applications in systems biology and presented with ample opportunities for developing new approaches and methods. The book is also appropriate for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scientists working in the fields of computational biology, genomic signal processing, control and systems theory, and computer science.

The Boolean network (BN) is a mathematical model of genetic networks and other biological networks. Although extensive studies have been done on BNs from a viewpoint of complex systems, not so many studies have been undertaken from a computational viewpoint. This book presents rigorous algorithmic results on important computational problems on BNs, which include inference of a BN, detection of singleton and periodic attractors in a BN, and control of a BN. This book also presents algorithmic results on fundamental computational problems on probabilistic Boolean networks and a Boolean model of metabolic networks. Although most contents of the book are based on the work by the author and collaborators, other important computational results and techniques are also reviewed or explained.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Algebraic Biology, AB 2008, held at the Castle of Hagenberg, Austria in July 2008 as part of the RISC Summer 2008, organized by the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation. The 14 revised full papers presented together with 3 tutorial lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. The conference is the interdisciplinary forum for the presentation of research on all aspects of applications of symbolic computation (computer algebra, computational logic, and related methods) to various issues in biology and life sciences as well as other problems in biology being approached with symbolic methods.