Genetic and genomic approaches have been used successfully to assign genes to distinct regulatory networks, but the uncertainty
concerning the connections between genes, the ambiguity inherent to the biological processes, and the impossibility of experimentally
determining the underlying biological properties only allow a rough prediction of the dynamics of genes. Here we describe
the GENIE methodology that formulates alternative models of genetic regulatory networks based on the available literature
and transcription factor binding site evidence. It also provides a framework for the analysis of these models optimized by
genetic algorithms, inferring their optimal parameters, simulating their behavior, evaluating them by integrating robustness,
realness and flexibility criteria, and contrasting the predictions to experimentally results obtained by Gene Fluorescence
Protein analysis. The application of this method to the regulatory network of the bacterium Salmonella enterica uncovered new mechanisms that enable the inter-connection of the PhoP/PhoQ and the PmrA/PmrB two component systems. The predictions
were experimentally verified to establish that both transcriptional and post-transcriptional mechanisms are employed to connect
these two systems.