For years, we have been building models of gene regulatory networks, where
recent advances in molecular biology shed some light on new structural and
dynamical properties of such highly complex systems. In this work, we propose a
novel timing of updates in Random and Scale-Free Boolean Networks, inspired by
recent findings in molecular biology. This update sequence is neither fully
synchronous nor asynchronous, but rather takes into account the sequence in
which genes affect each other. We have used both Kauffman's original model and
Aldana's extension, which takes into account the structural properties about
known parts of actual GRNs, where the degree distribution is right-skewed and
long-tailed. The computer simulations of the dynamics of the new model compare
favorably to the original ones and show biologically plausible results both in
terms of attractors number and length. We have complemented this study with a
complete analysis of our systems' stability under transient perturbations,
which is one of biological networks defining attribute. Results are
encouraging, as our model shows comparable and usually even better behavior
than preceding ones without loosing Boolean networks attractive simplicity.Comment: 29 pages, publishe