1st Leibniz MMS Days - Abstract
König, Rainer
Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) has many applications, most prominently in optimizing time tables and the traveling salesman problem. The beauty of this optimization strategy is that it can employ a given list of rules or constraints considerably limiting the search space on top of which linear and discrete optimization is performed. In biochemistry, stoichiometric equations have been derived for several thousand metabolites and reactions since the last 50 years restricting the space of possible metabolic fluxes when assuming steady state, leading to Flux Balance Analysis as a MILP application. We used MILP to optimize two dimensional arrangements of cellular networks, and applied MILP to infer gene regulatory interactions. Others used MILP based Steiner trees to infer gene regulatory modules in cellular networks. Within my presentation I will give a short introduction into the principle idea of MILP and will explain the above mentioned applications in the biomedical sciences.