Research Article
A Systems’ Biology Approach to Study MicroRNA-Mediated Gene Regulatory Networks
Table 3
Initial concentrations of model variables and model parameter values. Based on the experimental data, the p21-targeting miRNAs verified by Wu et al. [23] were divided into two groups: the translation repression group (marked with asterisk) and the mRNA deadenylation group. A miRNA was classified into the mRNA deadenylation group if its overexpression can result in 20% or more downregulation of the p21 mRNA level (i.e., p21 mRNA level ≤ 0.8; the basal level is 1); otherwise, it was classified into the translation repression group. For the translation repression group, only was estimated and was fixed. For the other group, both and were estimated. The initial concentrations of p21 and mp21 were set to 1, and this value was used as their basal expression levels. During the parameter estimation, the initial concentrations of p21-targeting miRNAs were set to 100, because in the publication [23] the expression levels of p21 and mp21 were measured after the individual introduction of the p21-targeting miRNAs with amount of 100 nM. Due to the lack of biological information to characterize the transcriptional activation function () of p21 and its targeting miRNAs, the corresponding functions were assumed to be 1 for simplicity. The data is adapted from our previous publication [4].
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||