Symbolic model checking of biochemical networks

Model checking is an automatic method for deciding if a circuit or a program, expressed as a concurrent transition system, satisfies a set of properties expressed in a temporal logic such as CTL. In this par per we argue that symbolic model checking is feasible in systems biology and that it shows some advantages over simulation for querying and validating formal models of biological processes. We report our experiments on using the symbolic model checker NuSMV and the constraint-based model checker DMC, for the, modeling and querying of two biological processes: a qualitative model of the mammalian cell cycle control after Kohn's diagrams, and a quantitative model of gene expression regulation.