System identification of circadian clock in plant Arabidopsis thaliana

The use of mathematical models in describing the dynamics of circadian clock in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana is gaining popularity. Models used to describe the plant circadian clock are usually derived from laws of physics and they comprise complex nonlinear ordinary differential equations. In this paper, we build mathematical models of the core loop of plant circadian clock using system identification techniques. This core loop involves two main genes (proteins), i.e. LHY/CCA1 and TOC1. Models obtained using system identification techniques are usually simple, sufficient to describe the relevant dynamics of the system and often are able to provide physical interpretation about the system. The obtained models through system identification can be useful for control design and prediction in the event for which we want to do phenotype manipulation and for understanding the behaviour of the system respectively.