Are cells really operating at the edge of chaos? a case study of two real-life regulatory networks

Authors:
Christian Darabos;Mario Giacobini;Marco Tomassini;Paolo Provero;Ferdinando Di Cunto
Affiliations:
Information Systems Department, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Lausanne, Switzerland and Computational Biology Unit, Molecular Biotechnology Center, University of Torino, Italy;Computational Biology Unit, Molecular Biotechnology Center, University of Torino, Italy and Department of Animal Production Epidemiology and Ecology, University of Torino, Italy;Information Systems Department, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Lausanne, Switzerland;Computational Biology Unit, Molecular Biotechnology Center, University of Torino, Italy and Department of Genetics Biology and Biochemistry, University of Torino, Italy;Computational Biology Unit, Molecular Biotechnology Center, University of Torino, Italy and Department of Genetics Biology and Biochemistry, University of Torino, Italy
Venue:
ECAL'09 Proceedings of the 10th European conference on Advances in artificial life: Darwin meets von Neumann - Volume Part I
Year:
2009

Citing 2
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Abstract

It has been suggested that the cells of living organisms are functioning in a near chaotic regime called critical, which offers a tradeoff between stability and evolvability. Abstract models for regulatory networks such as Kauffman's Random Boolean Networks certainly point in that direction. In this work, we applied the essence of these models to investigate the dynamical behavior of two real-life genetic regulatory networks, deduced in two different organisms. Moreover, a novel, more biologically accurate, way individual genes respond to activation signaling is investigated. We perform numerical simulation and successfully identify contexts in which our model's response can be interpreted as critical, thus most biologically plausible. We also discover that results are comparable in both studied organisms.