Minimal intervention strategies in logical signaling networks with ASP

Proposing relevant perturbations to biological signaling networks is central to many problems in biology and medicine because it allows for enabling or disabling certain biological outcomes. In contrast to quantitative methods that permit fine-grained (kinetic) analysis, qualitative approaches allow for addressing large-scale networks. This is accomplished by more abstract representations such as logical networks. We elaborate upon such a qualitative approach aiming at the computation of minimal interventions in logical signaling networks relying on Kleene’s threevalued logic and fixpoint semantics. We address this problem within answer set programming and show that it greatly outperforms previous work using dedicated algorithms.