A case study of the sensitivity and topology of nodes of reduced Boolean networks

Boolean networks are one of the models for studying complex dynamic behaviors in biological systems. The analysis of attractors of these networks is very important .But the exponential dependence of the state transition graph of these models with the number of network nodes is a major problem for large-scale systems analysis. Therefore, it is necessary to use network reduction methods. In these methods, the size of the networks is reduced, while the dynamic properties are preserved, but the reduction methods are not minimal. In this paper, while the two biological networks "abscisic acid" and "breast cancer" have been reduced, also the sensitivity analysis of the nodes of the reduced networks has been performed. The results show that reduced network nodes are important components in the main network dynamics because most of them have zero opposite sensitivity. Also, zero sensitivity nodes in reduced networks can be removed under certain conditions, using From the reduction method and the concept of sensitivity, our proposed method is able to modify the Saadatpour reduction method. Using the proposed method, we obtained reduced networks with fewer nodes that maintain the main network dynamics and have a smaller state space. These nodes are also important in both structural and dynamic aspects of biological networks.