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.