Fig. 3

Predicted chondrocyte profiles and canalization for the three emerging states during Monte Carlo analyses. The Monte Carlo analyses consist in sampling 10.000 random initial states for the variables, with the possibility to impose constraints (similar to external biological cues). A The Monte Carlo analysis without constraints highlights the existence of three final states (i.e., attractors) with different activity profiles (in columns). The global activity of a protein is presented in this table as the product of the predicted gene expression and the protein activation level. The table only reports the global activity; a complete table including the gene expression and protein activation levels is available in Data file S2. Rows represent the variables of the model and are grouped by pathways or functional groups. B Specific activity profiles were imposed to the growth factors, as reported in the table, while variables other than growth factors were initialized randomly. Profile A represents a possible healthy environment. Profile B represents a more pathological environment. The ‘Random’ column indicates the case without constraints in which initial activities were randomly sampled within the interval [0,1]. In the Sankey diagram, initial states are on the left and final states on the right. Strips indicate the percentage of initializations (among the 10.000) that reached each of the possible attractors during the Monte Carlo without constraints (“Random initializations”). That percentage is also reported for the Monte Carlo with constraints (profile A and B)