CoRa –A general approach for quantifying biological feedback control

Abstract

Feedback control is a fundamental underpinning of life, underlying homeostasis of biological processes at every scale of organization, from cells to ecosystems. The ability to evaluate the contribution and limitations of feedback control mechanisms operating in cells is a critical step for understanding and ultimately designing feedback control systems with biological molecules. Here, we introduce CoRa –or ControlRatio–, a general framework that quantifies the contribution of a biological feedback control mechanism to adaptation using a mathematically controlled comparison to an identical system that does not contain the feedback. CoRa provides a simple and intuitive metric with broad applicability to biological feedback systems.

CoRa—A general approach for quantifying biological feedback control

“…Code and simulations have been deposited in GitHub ( https://github.com/mgschiavon/CoRa ), and Zenodo (doi: 10.5281/zenodo.5842431 ) ( 18 , 19 ). Equations, parameters values, and algorithms also appear in SI Appendix .…”

Biological feedback control—Respect the loops

“…Of course, they do (Tyson et al, 2003;Domingo-Sananes and Novak, 2010). This is not only a mathematical certainty but is also backed up by much experimental work-for example, how different implementations of simple positive or negative feedback loops have different characteristics (Tyson et al, 2003;Gó mez-Schiavon and El-Samad, 2020). But, can some architectures of feedback loops work better in teams than others?…”