Finding a Periodic Attractor of a Boolean Network

In this paper, we study the problem of finding a periodic attractor of a Boolean network (BN), which arises in computational systems biology and is known to be NP-hard. Since a general case is quite hard to solve, we consider special but biologically important subclasses of BNs. For finding an attractor of period 2 of a BN consisting of n OR functions of positive literals, we present a polynomial time algorithm. For finding an attractor of period 2 of a BN consisting of n AND/OR functions of literals, we present an O(1.985ⁿ) time algorithm. For finding an attractor of a fixed period of a BN consisting of n nested canalyzing functions and having constant treewidth w, we present an O(n^2p(w+1)poly(n)) time algorithm.