An ASP-based Approach for Attractor Enumeration in Synchronous and Asynchronous Boolean Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces an ASP-based method for exhaustive attractor enumeration in both synchronous and asynchronous Boolean networks, aiding the analysis of gene regulatory network dynamics.

Contribution

It presents a novel ASP-based approach for attractor identification in Boolean networks, enabling comprehensive enumeration of all attractors.

Findings

Effective on real biological networks

Promising results in attractor enumeration

Applicable to both synchronous and asynchronous networks

Abstract

Boolean networks are conventionally used to represent and simulate gene regulatory networks. In the analysis of the dynamic of a Boolean network, the attractors are the objects of a special attention. In this work, we propose a novel approach based on Answer Set Programming (ASP) to express Boolean networks and simulate the dynamics of such networks. Our work focuses on the identification of the attractors, it relies on the exhaustive enumeration of all the attractors of synchronous and asynchronous Boolean networks. We applied and evaluated the proposed approach on real biological networks, and the obtained results indicate that this novel approach is promising.