Are the complex distributed genetic networks inherently oscillatory and chaotic?

Journal article, 2011

Complex mRNA-protein networks with distributed regulation of gene transcription are often mimicked by random Boolean networks. According to this mapping, the gene-expression kinetics are expected to depend strongly on the network connectivity, m. Specifically, the kinetics are predicted to be oscillatory or chaotic for m > 2. We analyze this problem in more detail by using an accurate model explicitly describing the mRNA-protein interplay with randomly organized transcriptional regulation. Contrary to the expectations, our mean-field calculations and Monte Carlo simulations performed for m = 1, 2 and 4 show that oscillations and chaos are lacking irrespective of m.