A discrete inhomogeneous model for the yeast cell cycle

TL;DR

This paper introduces an inhomogeneous discrete model for the yeast cell cycle, demonstrating that inhomogeneity enhances stability and robustness of the cell-cycle pathway, with implications for understanding biological robustness.

Contribution

It presents a novel inhomogeneous discrete modeling approach that improves understanding of yeast cell cycle stability and robustness compared to homogeneous models.

Findings

Inhomogeneity increases stability of the main attractor.

The basin of attraction remains robust against parameter changes.

The most frequent orbit aligns better with biological cell-cycle pathways.

Abstract

We study the robustness and stability of the yeast cell regulatory network by using a general inhomogeneous discrete model. We find that inhomogeneity, on average, enhances the stability of the biggest attractor of the dynamics and that the large size of the basin of attraction is robust against changes in the parameters of inhomogeneity. We find that the most frequent orbit, which represents the cell-cycle pathway, has a better biological meaning than the one exhibited by the homogeneous model.