Fig. 1
From: An efficient algorithm for identifying primary phenotype attractors of a large-scale Boolean network
The overall procedure of the proposed method. The STEPs explain how to find the attractors for a phenotype of interest in a given Boolean network step by step. The environment of the network defines the external condition in STEP1. The consistent activation of nodes for representing the phenotype provides the phenotype condition in STEP2, where the desired global attractor states for the proliferation phenotype must satisfy the constraint equations (b2). The network with the fully-simplified update rules (b3) is partitioned in STEP3. Concatenating the local attractors obtained from each partition yields the global attractors of the fully-simplified network in STEP4. Finally, in STEP5, the global attractors of the original network can be found by combining the global attractors of the simplified network in STEP4 and the fixed state values of ESENs (a1) and PSPNs (b1)