G1 and G2 arrests in response to osmotic shock are robust properties of the budding yeast cell cycle

Boolean modeling has been successfully applied to the budding yeast cell cycle to demonstrate that both its structure and its timing are robustly designed. However, from these studies few conclusions can be drawn how robust the cell cycle arrest upon osmotic stress and pheromone exposure might be. We therefore implement a compact Boolean model of the S. cerevisiae cell cycle including its interfaces with the High Osmolarity Glycerol (HOG) and the pheromone pathways. We show that all initial states of our model robustly converge to a cyclic attractor in the absence of stress inputs whereas pheromone exposure and osmotic stress lead to convergence to singleton states which correspond to G1 and G2 arrest in silico. A comparison with random Boolean networks reveals, that cell cycle arrest under osmotic stress is a highly robust property of the yeast cell cycle. We implemented our model using the novel frontend booleannetGUI to the python software booleannet.