Operational interactions in genetic networks: Application to an apoptosis signalling pathway

Discrete dynamical systems, and in particular nondeterministic Boolean automata, offer a convenient framework to analyse complex regulatory networks motivated by biological systems. In this paper, a method is proposed to analyse the dynamics of Boolean networks under the realistic context-sensitive asynchronous strategy. The main goal is to identify the operational interactions responsible for a given dynamical behaviour of the network. The application to a model of programmed cell death (apoptosis) uncovers two families of operational interactions, used by the cell to guide its decision between the survival or death pathways.