200 Feedback Control in Systems Biology
been developed within engineering to analyse the robustness of complex sys-
tems can be usefully employed by systems biologists in their efforts to develop
and validate computational models. In a pleasing example of interdisciplinary
feedback, this interest has recently spurred the development of several new
techniques which are specifically oriented towards the analysis of biologica l
systems.
In [49], for example, a computational approach was developed to investigate
generic topological properties leading to robustness and frag ility in large-scale
biomolecular networks. This study found that networks with a larger number
of positive feedback loops and a smaller number of negative feedback loops
are likely to