Fig. 1

a The regulatory network simulated in this work. The protein R, in the presence of signals, acts as a transcription factor, R*, and activates expression of the target protein, T. b The simulation scheme. Each of the six parameters was allotted a distinct minimum and maximum value, and 998 other distinct values in the range. The red dots represent one such parameter set. For each parameter, from its current value, movement via a single mutation is only permitted to k distinct values (highlighted in green). The likelihood of a value being taken by the parameter, post mutation, is given by a normal distribution centered around the current value of that parameter. In this work, P1 is bas (eq. 1); P2 is k (eq. 1); P3 is kd (eq. 1); P4 is β (eq. 3); P5 is K_m (eq. 3); and P6 is k_dT (eq. 3). To reduce the computational complexity of the set-up, in this work, k_dR was taken to be 0.001 times maximum value of k_d in all parameter sets