Transient perturbations on scale-free boolean networks with topology driven dynamics

Abstract

Taking into account the topology of genetic regulatory networks and abstracting recent findings about them, we investigate the behavior of a new, more biologically plausible, variation of the original Random Boolean Network paradigm. We study the dynamics of Boolean networks with scale-free structures, that evolve in time using a semi-synchronous topology-driven update scheme. Simulating statistical ensembles of networks, we discuss the attractors of the dynamics, and analyze in depth the fault-tolerance of the proposed model. Results are encouraging, as our model shows comparable and usually better performance and resilience to perturbations than the original one and is closer in spirit to real-life networks. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.