IMSc Webinar

Biologically Meaningful functions in Boolean Models of Living systems

Subbaroyan Ajay

IMSc

Since the early work by Stuart Kauffman, Boolean networks have become a widely-used framework to model cellular decision making processes. Logical update rules (or Boolean functions), which form the logical edifice of Boolean networks, govern the local dynamics of the system. We critically assess the preponderance of the known classes of Boolean functions in more than 80 models of biological systems and relate our empirical observations on to biologically meaningful properties. We introduce an existing notion of complexity which has not been previously explored in biological systems, and look at the representation of low-complexity Boolean functions in the biological models. Our work naturally leads to a novel class of Boolean functions which satisfy biologically meaningful constraints and have low complexity. This work has been done in collaboration with Olivier C. Martin (INRAE, France) and Areejit Samal. GOOGLE MEET LINK:meet.google.com/voe-feeg-uxf