Quantifying global tolerance of biochemical systems: design implications for moiety-transfer cycles.

ABSTRACT: Robustness of organisms is widely observed although difficult to precisely characterize. Performance can remain nearly constant within some neighborhood of the normal operating regime, leading to homeostasis, but then abruptly break down with pathological consequences beyond this neighborhood. Currently, there is no generic approach to identifying boundaries where local performance deteriorates abruptly, and this has hampered understanding of the molecular basis of biological robustness. Here we introduce a generic approach for characterizing boundaries between operational regimes based on the piecewise power-law representation of the system's components. This conceptual framework allows us to define "global tolerance" as the ratio between the normal value of a parameter and the value at s

SUBMITTER: Coelho PM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2650413 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature