A Logic-Based Technique that Characterizes the Class of Boolean Networks
Producing a Given Biological Pathway
Guanyu Wang1 , Rahul Simha2 , and Chen Zeng1
2
1
Department of Physics, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA
Department of Computer Science, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA
This paper considers Boolean models of biological networks as commonly applied to gene regulation. In such networks, any given start state leads deterministically to a sequence of states that
end in an attractor or repeat in a cycle. Recently, some papers have constructed Boolean networks
to explain particular biological pathways such as the cell cycle, in which the sequence of states is
known to correspond to a particular biological function, and which raise interesting questions: how
many networks produce a given sequence? What makes the naturally occurring network unique
amongst these? This paper presents a logic-based technique to analyze such networks and, as a
result, identifies an interesting property of the class of networks modeling the cell-cycle that helps
address the latter question.