Large attractors in cooperative bi-quadratic Boolean networks. Part II

Boolean networks have been the object of much attention, especially since S. Kauffman proposed them in the 1960's as models for gene regulatory networks. These systems are characterized by being defined on a Boolean state space and by simultaneous updating at discrete time steps. Of particular importance for biological applications are networks in which the indegree for each variable is bounded by a fixed constant, as was stressed by Kauffman in his original papers. An important question is which conditions on the network topology can rule out exponentially long periodic orbits in the system. In this paper we consider cooperative systems, i.e. systems with positive feedback interconnections among all variables, which in a continuous setting guarantees a very stable dynamics. In Part I of this paper we presented a construction that shows that for an arbitrary constant 0<c<2 and sufficiently large n there exist n-dimensional Boolean cooperative networks in which both the indegree and outdegree of each for each variable is bounded by two (bi-quadratic networks) and which nevertheless contain periodic orbits of length at least c^n. In this part, we prove an inverse result showing that for sufficiently large n and for 0<c<2 sufficiently close to 2, any n-dimensional cooperative, bi-quadratic Boolean network with a cycle of length at least c^n must have a large proportion of variables with indegree 1. Such systems therefore share a structural similarity to the systems constructed in Part I.