Systems Biology (Methods in Molecular Biology)

Lu et al. [25], applying a methodology based on the inverse

map from the space of bifurcation diagrams to biological space

parameters, has shown that many questions of biological interest

may be formulated by the inverse bifurcation defined as an optimi-

zation problem which involves minimal distances to bifurcation

manifold.

4 Conclusions

Inverse problems and sloppy models are only part of the more

general problem approach of inverse problems applied to systems

biology. Despite many mathematical tools are available for specific

problems posed by systems biology studies, as reviewed among

others by Villaverde and Banga [26], the core problem of how to

derive system level organization from experimental results remains

largely unsolved. Accordingly, the modelling of biological systems

is far to be treated as a complete engineered system, thus the use of

the reverse engineering approach appears to be a difficult road

because different perspectives of systems biology coexist. Large-

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15 0.20 0.25

0.0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

u

Fig. 3A phase portrait of the Tyson’s model

82 Rodolfo Guzzi et al.