Stochastic model of yeast cell-cycle network (Q2500679)

The gene-protein interaction in the four-phase cell division cycle is modeled by a probabilistic Boolean network for a yeast cell. The interaction is described by a graph with 11 nodes. Each node corresponds to some protein or protein complex. The nodes can be in active (1) or inactive (0) state. The interaction is represented by oriented vertexes which correspond to activation (positive interaction), repression (negative interaction) and self degradation (loop vertexes). The cell state is described by a combination of node states i.e., there are \(2^{11}\) different cell states. The transitions between the cell states are described by a Markov chain in which transitions for node states are conditionally independent given the previous cell state. Their probabilities are described by a kind of logistic function. The authors investigate the stationary distribution of the obtained Markov chain for different values of parameters via simulations. It is demonstrated that for low levels of noise the biological pathway is stable.