New insights into the human body iron metabolism analyzed by a Petri net based approach

Iron homeostasis is one of the most important biochemical processes in the human body. Despite this fact, the process is not fully understood and until recently only rough descriptions of parts of the process could be found in the literature. Here, an extension of the recently published formal model of the main part of the process is presented. This extension consists in including all known mechanisms of hepcidin regulation. Hepcidin is a hormone synthesized in the liver which is mainly responsible for an inhibition of iron absorption in the small intestine during an inflammatory process. The model is expressed in the language of Petri net theory which allows for its relatively easy analysis and simulation.