Computation of amplification for systems arising from cellular signaling pathways
Abstract
A commonly employed measure of the signal amplification properties of aninput/output system is its induced L2 norm, sometimes alsoknown as H infinity gain.In general, however, it is extremely difficult to compute the numerical valuefor this norm, or even to check that it is finite, unless the system beingstudied is linear.This paper describes a class of systems for which it is possible toreduce this computation to that of finding the norm of an associated linearsystem. In contrast to linearization approaches, a precise value, not an estimate,is obtained for the full nonlinear model.The class of systems that we study arose from the modeling of certainbiological intracellular signaling cascades, but the results should be of widerapplicability.