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Publications about 'dose response'
Articles in journal or book chapters
  1. A. Gupta and E. D. Sontag. Cumulative dose responses for adapting biological systems. Royal Society Interface, 22:20240877, 2025. [PDF] Keyword(s): dose response, perfect adaptation, systems biology, incoherent feedforward loops, integral feedback, immunology, T cells.
    Abstract:
    This paper introduces the notion of cumulative dose response (cDR). The cDR is the area under the plot of a response variable, an integral taken over a fixed time interval and seen as a function of an input parameter. This work was motivated by the accumulation of cytokines resulting from T cell stimulation, where a non-monotonic cDR has been observed experimentally. However, the notion is of general applicability. A surprising conclusion is that incoherent feedforward loops studied in the systems biology literature, though capable of non-monotonic dose responses, can be mathematically shown to always result in monotonic cDR.


  2. E.D. Sontag. Bell-shaped dose response for a system with no IFFLs. bioRxiv, 2020. [PDF] Keyword(s): IFFL, feedforward loops, nonlinear systems, immunology.
    Abstract:
    It is well known that the presence of an incoherent feedforward loop (IFFL) in a network may give rise to a steady state non-monotonic dose response. This note shows that the converse implication does not hold. It gives an example of a three-dimensional system that has no IFFLs, yet its dose response is bell-shaped. It also studies under what conditions the result is true for two-dimensional systems, in the process recovering, in far more generality, a result given in the T-cell activation literature.


Conference articles
  1. P. Yu and E.D. Sontag. A necessary condition for non-monotonic dose response, with an application to a kinetic proofreading model. In Proc. 2024 63rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), pages 4823-4829, 2024. Note: Note: there is an extended version in arXiv; also, a journal paper is in preparation.[PDF] Keyword(s): systems biology, IFFL, dose response.
    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.


Miscellaneous
  1. Eduardo D. Sontag. Dynamic response phenotypes and model discrimination in systems and synthetic biology, 2025. [WWW] Keyword(s): transient behavior, cumulative dose response, dose respose, monotone systems, fold-change detection, scale invariance, reverse engineering, gene networks, cell signaling.
    Abstract:
    Biological systems encode function not primarily in steady states, but in the structure of transient responses elicited by time-varying stimuli. Overshoots, biphasic dynamics, adaptation kinetics, fold-change detection, entrainment, and cumulative exposure effects often determine phenotypic outcomes, yet are poorly captured by classical steady-state or dose-response analyses. This paper develops an input-output perspective on such "dynamic phenotypes," emphasizing how qualitative features of transient behavior constrain underlying network architectures independently of detailed parameter values. A central theme is the role of sign structure and interconnection logic, particularly the contrast between monotone systems and architectures containing antagonistic pathways. We show how incoherent feedforward (IFF) motifs provide a simple and recurrent mechanism for generating non-monotonic and adaptive responses across multiple levels of biological organization, from molecular signaling to immune regulation and population dynamics. Conversely, monotonicity imposes sharp impossibility results that can be used to falsify entire classes of models from transient data alone. Beyond step inputs, we highlight how periodic forcing, ramps, and integral-type readouts such as cumulative dose responses offer powerful experimental probes that reveal otherwise hidden structure, separate competing motifs, and expose invariances such as fold-change detection. Throughout, we illustrate how control-theoretic concepts, including monotonicity, equivariance, and input-output analysis, can be used not as engineering metaphors, but as precise mathematical tools for biological model discrimination. Thus we argue for a shift in emphasis from asymptotic behavior to transient and input-driven dynamics as a primary lens for understanding, testing, and reverse-engineering biological networks.



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