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Published in:
2011 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
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
Published in: Advances in Artificial Life. Darwin Meets von Neumann
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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It has been suggested that the cells of living organisms are functioning in a near chaotic regime called
critical
, which offers a trade-off 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.