An overview of recent applications of Game Theory to bioinformatics

The goal of this work is to provide a comprehensive review of different Game Theory applications that have been recently used to predict the behavior of non-rational agents in interaction situations arising from computational biology. In the first part of the paper, we focus on evolutionary games and their application to modelling the evolution of virulence. Here, the notion of Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) plays an important role in modelling mutation mechanisms, whereas selection mechanisms are explained by means of the concept of replicator dynamics. In the second part, we describe a couple of applications concerning cooperative games in coalitional form, namely microarray games and Multi-perturbation Shapley value Analysis (MSA), for the analysis of genetic data. In both of the approaches, the Shapley value is used to assess the power of genes in complex regulatory pathways. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.