Sensitivity Analysis of Signaling Pathways in the Frequency Domain

Sensitivity analysis methods have been in use for over half a century. In recent years they have been applied also to perform analysis of biological systems models. While sensitivity methods proved to be helpful in analysis of various pathway models whose simulation results units were fixed, they may lead to false conclusions when the model is based on relative data. For this reason it is necessary to develop methods which take into account specificity of such experimental data. In this paper we propose a method based on frequency distribution of a system time response to create parameter rankings, that can be used to find the most important parameters and processes and subsequently can be used e.g. to indicate molecular targets for new drugs. In order to test the proposed procedure we performed sensitivity analysis of several signaling pathways and we compared the results with the sensitivity functions method.