Dynamical Systems Seminar

Systems of differential equations have been used to model biological systems such as gene and neural networks. A problem of particular interest is to understand and control the number of stable steady states. Here we propose conjunctive networks (systems of differential equations equations created using AND gates) to achieve any desired number of stable steady states. Our approach uses combinatorial tools to easily predict the number of stable steady states from the structure of the wiring diagram. AND gates have been successfully engineered in gene networks, so our results can be used to design gene networks to achieve arbitrary number of phenotypes.