The response to a knockout of a node is a characteristic feature of a
networked dynamical system. Knockout resilience in the dynamics of the
remaining nodes is a sign of robustness. Here we study the effect of knockouts
for binary state sequences and their implementations in terms of Boolean
threshold networks. Beside random sequences with biologically plausible
constraints, we analyze the cell cycle sequence of the species Saccharomyces
cerevisiae and the Boolean networks implementing it. Comparing with an
appropriate null model we do not find evidence that the yeast wildtype network
is optimized for high knockout resilience. Our notion of knockout resilience
weakly correlates with the size of the basin of attraction, which has also been
considered a measure of robustness.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 3 table
