title: Robustness of Boolean dynamics under knockouts.
abstract: The response to a knockout of a node is a characteristic feature of a networked dynamical system. Knockout resilience in the dynamics of the remaining nodes is a sign of robustness. Here we study the effect of knockouts for binary state sequences and their implementations in terms of Boolean threshold networks. Besides random sequences with biologically plausible constraints, we analyze the cell cycle sequence of the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the Boolean networks implementing it. Comparing with an appropriate null model we do not find evidence that the yeast wildtype network is optimized for high knockout resilience. Our notion of knockout resilience weakly correlates with the size of the basin of attraction, which has also been considered a measure of robustness.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Computer Science, University of Leipzig, Germany.
authors.forename: Gunnar
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Boldhaus
authors.forename: Nils
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Bertschinger
authors.forename: Johannes
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rauh
authors.forename: Eckehard
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Olbrich
authors.forename: Konstantin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Klemm
mesh_terms: D018797:Cell Cycle Proteins / Q000502:physiology*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D055786:Gene Knockout Techniques; D016015:Logistic Models; D008954:Models, Biological; D012441:Saccharomyces cerevisiae / Q000166:cytology* / Q000502:physiology*; D029701:Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins / Q000502:physiology*; D015398:Signal Transduction / Q000502:physiology*
chemical_list: D018797:Cell Cycle Proteins; D029701:Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins