"Immunetworks", intersecting circuits and dynamics

This paper proposes a study of biological regulation networks based on a multi-level strategy. Given a network, the first structural level of this strategy consists in analysing the architecture of the network interactions in order to describe it. The second dynamical level consists in relating the patterns found in the architecture to the possible dynamical behaviours of the network. It is known that circuits are the patterns that play the most important part in the dynamics of a network in the sense that they are responsible for the diversity of its asymptotic behaviours. Here, we pursue further this idea and argue that beyond the influence of underlying circuits, intersections of circuits also impact significantly on the dynamics of a network and thus need to be payed special attention to. For some genetic regulation networks involved in the control of the immune system ("immunetworks"), we show that the small number of attractors can be explained by the presence, in the underlying structures of these networks, of intersecting circuits that "inter-lock".