2007/11/18 by Germán Enciso, German A. Enciso, Enciso, German A. +2
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Mathematics · #FOS: Biological sciences #Gene Regulatory Network Analysis #Mathematical Biology Tumor Growth #Molecular Networks (q-bio.MN) #Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM) #q-bio.MN #q-bio.QM
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0711.2799
13 pages, 2 figures resubmission with additional references
openalex publication_date 2007/11/18 · arxiv created 2007/11/21 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Boolean networks have been the object of much attention, especially since S. Kauffman proposed them in the 1960's as models for gene regulatory networks. These systems are characterized by being defined on a Boolean state space and by simultaneous updating at discrete time steps. Of particular importance for biological applications are networks in which the indegree for each variable is bounded by a fixed constant, as was stressed by Kauffman in his original papers. An important question is which conditions on the network topology can rule out exponentially long periodic orbits in the system. In this paper, we consider systems with positive feedback interconnections among all variables (known as cooperative systems), which in a continuous setting guarantees a very stable dynamics. We show that for an arbitrary constant 0<c<2 and sufficiently large n there exist n-dimensional cooperative Boolean networks in which both the indegree and outdegree of each variable is bounded by two, and which nevertheless contain periodic orbits of length at least cn. In Part II of this paper we will prove an inverse result showing that any system with such a dynamic behavior must in a sense be similar to the example described.