Attractors are less stable than their basins: Canalization creates a coherence gap in gene regulatory networks.

ABSTRACT: Waddington's epigenetic landscape has served as biology's central metaphor for cellular differentiation for over half a century, depicting mature cell types as balls resting in stable valley floors. Boolean networks - introduced by Kauffman in 1969 to model gene regulatory dynamics - provide a mathematical formalization of this landscape, where attractors represent phenotypes and basins of attraction correspond to developmental valleys. Traditional stability measures quantify robustness by perturbing arbitrary states, yet biological systems typically reside at attractors rather than in transient states. Here we formalize and systematically analyze attractor coherence - a stability measure Kauffman originally envisioned but never rigorously developed - which quantifies how likely a perturba

SUBMITTER: Bavisetty VSN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12637702 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature