Robustness portraits of diverse biological networks conserved despite order-of-magnitude parameter uncertainty.

ABSTRACT:

Motivation

Biological networks are robust to a wide variety of internal and external perturbations, yet fragile or sensitive to a small minority of perturbations. Due to this rare sensitivity of networks to certain perturbations, it is unclear how precisely biochemical parameters must be experimentally measured in order to accurately predict network function.

Results

Here, we examined a model of cardiac β-adrenergic signaling and found that its robustness portrait, a global measure of steady-state network function, was well conserved even when all parameters were rounded to their nearest 1-2 orders of magnitude. In contrast, β-adrenergic network kinetics were more sensitive to parameter precision. This analysis was then extended to 10 additional networks, including Escherich

SUBMITTER: Soltis AR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3187657 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature