Bidirectional Relationships and Attractor Structure of Boolean Networks

Inferring Boolean networks from non-temporal data suffers from a lack of directionality of the prediction. As a result, inferred networks often possess spurious non-singleton attractor cycles inconsistent with the assumption that the data represent the steady-state of the real genomic regulatory system. Bidirectional gene relationships can be responsible for non-singleton attractor cycles and thereby adversely affect network design. We present several results relating bidirectional gene relationships to attractor cycles.