IEEE/ACM Trans Comput Biol Bioinform. 2020 Nov-Dec;17(6):2098-2106. doi: 10.1109/TCBB.2019.2917196. Epub 2020 Dec 8.
Bistability, i.e., the existence of just two stable equilibria, is known to play an important role in biological systems, e.g., cellular differentiation and apoptosis. In this paper, we consider the bistability but as a structural property of a class of network systems, that is, the bistability under the assumption that the information on the network structure is available but the information on the components is not available. First, we introduce Boolean networks as a model of biological network systems and give the notion of structural bistability. We next focus on the systems with a flower-shaped network structure and present a necessary and sufficient condition based on three characteristics of the network topology. Finally, the result is extended to the Boolean networks with a chain-shaped network structure.
双稳性，即仅有两个稳定平衡点的存在，被认为在生物系统中起着重要作用，例如细胞分化和细胞凋亡。在本文中，我们考虑的双稳性是作为一类网络系统的结构特性，即假设网络结构的信息是可用的，但组件的信息不可用的情况下的双稳性。首先，我们引入布尔网络作为生物网络系统的模型，并给出结构双稳性的概念。接下来，我们专注于具有花形网络结构的系统，并提出了一种基于网络拓扑的三个特征的必要和充分条件。最后，将结果扩展到具有链形网络结构的布尔网络。
