Detecting a Singleton Attractor in a Boolean Network Utilizing SAT Algorithms

Takeyuki TAMURA  Tatsuya AKUTSU 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences  Vol.E92-A  No.2  pp.493-501
Publication Date: 2009/02/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Algorithms and Data Structures
Keyword: 
Boolean network,  singleton attractor,  fixed point,  SAT,  NP-hard, 

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Summary: 
The Boolean network (BN) is a mathematical model of genetic networks. It is known that detecting a singleton attractor, which is also called a fixed point, is NP-hard even for AND/OR BNs (i.e., BNs consisting of AND/OR nodes), where singleton attractors correspond to steady states. Though a naive algorithm can detect a singleton attractor for an AND/OR BN in O(n 2n) time, no O((2-ε)n) (ε > 0) time algorithm was known even for an AND/OR BN with non-restricted indegree, where n is the number of nodes in a BN. In this paper, we present an O(1.787n) time algorithm for detecting a singleton attractor of a given AND/OR BN, along with related results. We also show that detection of a singleton attractor in a BN with maximum indegree two is NP-hard and can be polynomially reduced to a satisfiability problem.