Despite recent molecular technique improvements, biological knowledge remains
incomplete. Reasoning on living systems hence implies to integrate
heterogeneous and partial informations. Although current investigations
successfully focus on qualitative behaviors of macromolecular networks, others
approaches show partial quantitative informations like protein concentration
variations over times. We consider that both informations, qualitative and
quantitative, have to be combined into a modeling method to provide a better
understanding of the biological system. We propose here such a method using a
probabilistic-like approach. After its exhaustive description, we illustrate
its advantages by modeling the carbon starvation response in Escherichia coli.
In this purpose, we build an original qualitative model based on available
observations. After the formal verification of its qualitative properties, the
probabilistic model shows quantitative results corresponding to biological
expectations which confirm the interest of our probabilistic approach.Comment: 10 page
