English

Negative circuits and sustained oscillations in asynchronous automata networks

Discrete Mathematics 2009-07-30 v1

Abstract

The biologist Ren\'e Thomas conjectured, twenty years ago, that the presence of a negative feedback circuit in the interaction graph of a dynamical system is a necessary condition for this system to produce sustained oscillations. In this paper, we state and prove this conjecture for asynchronous automata networks, a class of discrete dynamical systems extensively used to model the behaviors of gene networks. As a corollary, we obtain the following fixed point theorem: given a product XX of nn finite intervals of integers, and a map FF from XX to itself, if the interaction graph associated with FF has no negative circuit, then FF has at least one fixed point.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0907.5096,
  title  = {Negative circuits and sustained oscillations in asynchronous automata networks},
  author = {Adrien Richard},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0907.5096},
  year   = {2009}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T13:30:22.542Z