Understanding the molecular mechanisms involved in gene regulation is one of the basic issues of systems biology. Conventional approaches to modeling gene regulation often fail to distinguish between the model properties that adequately reflect the characteristics of a biological system and those associated with the nature of the model. A logical approach was developed for modeling the regulation of gene expression, which provides maximal further use of the available empirical data and minimal use of a priory hypotheses. Rules of gene regulation were formulated in the form of linguistic conditions, that is, in a language similar to human languages. Fuzzy linguistic modeling (FLM) was used as a method that more accurately reflects the actual data. This study is the first to employ FLM in constructing models of the activities of cis-regulatory modules (CRMs) and to apply the method to the problems related to expression of genes involved in biochemical patterning of embryos. Essential details were thus clarified for the mechanisms by which primary morphological gradients are read by a combination of two or more cis-regulatory modules of the same gene.

了解基因调控涉及的分子机制是系统生物学的基本问题之一。建立基因调控模型的常规方法通常无法区分能够充分反映生物系统特征的模型属性和与模型性质相关的模型属性。已开发出一种用于对基因表达调控进行建模的逻辑方法，该方法可最大程度地进一步利用可用的经验数据，而对先验假设的使用最少。基因调节规则以语言条件的形式制定，即以类似于人类语言的语言表达。模糊语言建模（FLM）被用作更准确地反映实际数据的方法。这项研究是首次采用FLM构建顺式调控模块（CRM）活性的模型，并将该方法应用于与胚胎生化模式涉及的基因表达相关的问题。因此，对于通过相同基因的两个或多个顺式调控模块的组合读取主要形态梯度的机理，已阐明了基本细节。