Robustness of Boolean networks to update modes: an application to hereditary angioedema
For researchers studying Boolean network dynamics and their application to genetic diseases, this work provides a case study of robustness analysis but is incremental in nature.
The paper studies the robustness of Boolean network dynamics under different update modes, applied to a gene interaction graph for hereditary angioedema. It identifies structural conditions for stability or instability of periodic update patterns.
Many familial diseases are caused by genetic accidents, which affect both the genome and its epigenetic environment, expressed as an interaction graph between the genes as that involved in one familial disease we shall study, the hereditary angioedema. The update of the gene states at the vertices of this graph (1 if a gene is activated, 0 if it is inhibited) can be done in multiple ways, well studied over the last two decades: Parallel, sequential, block-sequential, block-parallel, random, etc. We will study a particular graph, related to the familial disease proposed as an example, which has subgraphs which activate in an intricate manner (\emph{i.e.}, in an alternating block-parallel mode, with one core constantly updated and two complementary subsets of genes alternating their updating), of which we will study the structural aspects, robust or unstable, in relation to some classical periodic update modes.