Modeling pathways of differentiation in genetic regulatory networks with Boolean networks

We have carried out the first examination of pathways of cell differentiation in model genetic networks in which cell types are assumed to be attractors of the nonlinear dynamics, and difterentiation corresponds to a transition of the cell to a new basin of attraction, which may be induced by a signal or noise perturbation. The associated flow along a transient to a new attractor corresponds to a pathway of differentiation. We have measured a variety of features of such model pathways of differentiation, most of which should be observable using gene array techniques. (c) 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.