  Bistable biological regulatory systems need to cope with stochastic noise to
fine-tune their function close to bifurcation points. Here, we study stability
properties of this regime in generic systems to demonstrate that cooperative
interactions buffer system variability, hampering noise-induced regime shifts.
Our analysis also shows that, in the considered cooperativity range, impending
regime shifts can be generically detected by statistical early warning signals
from distributional data. Our generic framework, based on minimal models, can
be used to extract robustness and variability properties of more complex models
and empirical data close to criticality.
