CANA: A python package for quantifying control and canalization in Boolean Networks

TL;DR

CANA is a Python package designed to analyze Boolean networks by quantifying canalization, simplifying complex biochemical regulation models, and identifying key control pathways to enhance understanding of network dynamics.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new Python tool that measures and visualizes canalization in Boolean networks, aiding in control and robustness analysis of biochemical models.

Findings

Provides tools to extract control pathways in Boolean networks

Enables visualization of canalizing redundancy

Facilitates analysis of network robustness and control

Abstract

Logical models offer a simple but powerful means to understand the complex dynamics of biochemical regulation, without the need to estimate kinetic parameters. However, even simple automata components can lead to collective dynamics that are computationally intractable when aggregated into networks. In previous work we demonstrated that automata network models of biochemical regulation are highly canalizing, whereby many variable states and their groupings are redundant (Marques-Pita and Rocha, 2013). The precise charting and measurement of such canalization simplifies these models, making even very large networks amenable to analysis. Moreover, canalization plays an important role in the control, robustness, modularity and criticality of Boolean network dynamics, especially those used to model biochemical regulation (Gates and Rocha, 2016; Gates et al., 2016; Manicka, 2017). Here we describe a new publicly-available Python package that provides the necessary tools to extract, measure, and visualize canalizing redundancy present in Boolean network models. It extracts the pathways most effective in controlling dynamics in these models, including their effective graph and dynamics canalizing map, as well as other tools to uncover minimum sets of control variables.