Modelling Inhibition in Metabolic Pathways Through Abduction and Induction

In this paper, we study how a logical form of scientific modelling that integrates together abduction and induction can be used to understand the functional class of unknown enzymes or inhibitors. We show how we can model, within Abductive Logic Programming (ALP), inhibition in metabolic pathways and use abduction to generate facts about inhibition of enzymes by a particular toxin (e.g. Hydrazine) given the underlying metabolic pathway and observations about the concentration of metabolites. These ground facts, together with biochemical background information, can then be generalised by ILP to generate rules about the inhibition by Hydrazine thus enriching further our model. In particular, using Progol 5.0 where the processes of abduction and inductive generalization are integrated enables us to learn such general rules. Experimental results on modelling in this way the effect of Hydrazine in a real metabolic pathway are presented.