Artificial Cell Systems Based in Gene Expression Protein Effects - Advancing Artificial Intelligence Through Biological Process Applications - page 147

Chapter IX
Artificial Cell Systems Based in
Gene Expression Protein Effects

Enrique Fernández-Blanco
University of A Coruña, Spain

Julian Dorado
University of A Coruña, Spain

Nieves Pedreira
University of A Coruña, Spain

AbSTRACT

The artificial embryogeny term overlaps all the models that try to adapt cellular properties into arti-
ficial models. This chapter presents a new model for artificial embryogeny that mimics the behaviour
of biological cells, whose characteristics can be applied to solution of computational problems. The
paper contains the theoretical development of the model and some test executed in an implementation
of that model. The presented tests apply the model to simple structure generation and provide promis-
ing results with regard to its behaviour and applicability to more complex problems. The objective of
the chapters is to be an introduction of the artificial embryogeny and shows an example of a model of
these techniques.

INTRODUCTION

with no need for centralized control (Watson &
Crick, 1953). The cells can perform such process
thanks to the existence of a general plan, encoded
in the DNA for the development and functioning
of the system. Another interesting characteristic
of natural cells is that they form systems that are
tolerant to partial failures: small errors do not
induce a global collapse of the system. Finally,
the tissues that are composed by biological cells

Use biology as inspiration for the creation of
computational models is not a new idea: science
has already been the basis for the famous artifi-
cial neuron models (Hassoun, 1995), the genetic
algorithms (Holland, 1975), etc. The cells of a
biological organism are able to compose very
complex structures from a unique cell, the zygote,