Abstract: |
Steady state non-monotonic ("biphasic") dose responses are often observed in experimental biology, which raises the control theoretic question of identifying which possible mechanisms might underlie such behaviors. It is well known that the presence of an incoherent feedforward loop (IFFL) in a network may give rise to a non-monotonic response, and it has been informally conjectured that this condition is also necessary. However, this conjecture has been disproved with an example of a system in which input and output nodes are the same. In this paper, we show that the converse implication does hold when the input and output are distinct. Towards this aim, we give necessary and sufficient conditions for when minors of a symbolic matrix have mixed signs. Finally, we study in full generality when a model of immune T-cell activation could exhibit a steady state non-monotonic dose response. |