Modeling the genetic information transmission based on Colored Petri Nets

Abstract

In molecular biology, gene expression is the basic process in living systems and it describes the process of genetic information transfer from DNA to protein. Understanding and description of this process is mainly based on the traditional textual representation model. As a mature mathematical theory tools used in the process analysis, Colored Petri Net (CPN) provides a new and effective theoretical methods for studying the basic processes in living systems. In this paper, we propose a CPN model to describe the process of genetic information transfer, which successfully characterized the genetic information from DNA transcribes to mRNA and then translates to protein. The operation of this model can be divided into five stages: initialization, transcription, determination of the start codon, determination of the stop codons, and translation. This model is conducive to understand and analysis the microbiological processes intuitively.