Target Control of Asynchronous Boolean Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces efficient methods for target control of asynchronous Boolean networks, enabling the identification of minimal interventions to steer network dynamics towards desired attractors, applicable to large biological systems.

Contribution

The paper presents novel scalable algorithms for target control in asynchronous Boolean networks, accommodating different perturbation types and outperforming existing methods in biological network applications.

Findings

Methods scale well for large networks

Able to identify solutions with few perturbations

Compared favorably with stable motif-based control

Abstract

We study the target control of asynchronous Boolean networks, to identify efficacious interventions that can drive the dynamics of a given Boolean network from any initial state to the desired target attractor. Based on the application time, the control can be realised with three types of perturbations, including instantaneous, temporary and permanent perturbations. We develop efficient methods to compute the target control for a given target attractor with three types of perturbations. We compare our methods with the stable motif-based control on a variety of real-life biological networks to evaluate their performance. We show that our methods scale well for large Boolean networks and they are able to identify a rich set of solutions with a small number of perturbations.