Taming Asynchrony for Attractor Detection in Large Boolean Networks

IEEE/ACM Trans Comput Biol Bioinform. 2019 Jan-Feb;16(1):31-42. doi: 10.1109/TCBB.2018.2850901. Epub 2018 Jun 27.

Abstract

Boolean networks is a well-established formalism for modelling biological systems. A vital challenge for analyzing a Boolean network is to identify all the attractors. This becomes more challenging for large asynchronous Boolean networks, due to the asynchronous scheme. Existing methods are prohibited due to the well-known state-space explosion problem in large Boolean networks. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by proposing a SCC-based decomposition method. We prove the correctness of our proposed method and demonstrate its efficiency with two real-life biological networks.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Gene Regulatory Networks / genetics*
  • Humans
  • Models, Genetic*
  • Neoplasms / genetics