Gene-gene cooperativity in small networks

Abstract

We show how to construct a reduced description of interacting genes in noisy, small regulatory networks using coupled binary "spin" variables. Treating both the protein number and gene expression state variables stochastically and on equal footing we propose a mapping which connects the molecular level description of networks to the binary representation. We construct a phase diagram indicating when genes can be considered to be independent and when the coupling between them cannot be neglected leading to synchrony or correlations. We find that an appropriately mapped boolean description reproduces the probabilities of gene expression states of the full stochastic system very well and can be transfered to examples of self-regulatory systems with a larger number of gene copies.