Fundamentals of Systems Biology

Chapter 4Variation: Graphical Analysis

Learning Objectives

• Generate plots of X versus dX/dt for single ODE systems
• Calculate fixed points and determine their stability using vector fields
• Draw time-course plots from arbitrary initial conditions using graphical analysis
• Understand how changing parameters can lead to bifurcation

When I ask my students about the most surprising moments they experienced in my systems biology course, the power of Boolean analysis is usually on their list. Many of them are particularly caught off guard by the number of conditions that you can examine simultaneously using this approach. By comparison, our ODE-based analytical approach is relatively limited; we only looked at a couple of initial conditions and had ...