Metabolic control analysis (MCA) is a mathematical framework for describing metabolic, signaling and genetic pathways. MCA quantifies how variables, such as fluxes and species concentrations, depend on network parameters. In particular it is able to describe how network dependent properties, called control coefficients, depend on local properties called elasticities.
MCA was originally developed to describe the control in metabolic pathways but was subsequently extended to describe signaling and genetic networks. MCA has sometimes also been referred to as Metabolic Control Theory but this terminology was rather strongly opposed by Henrik Kacser, one of the founders.
More recent work has shown that MCA can be mapped directly on to classical control theory and are as such equivalent.
Biochemical systems theory is a similar formalism, though with a rather different objectives. Both are evolutions of an earlier theoretical analysis by Joseph Higgins.
Read more about Metabolic Control Analysis: Control Coefficients, Elasticity Coefficients, Control Equations, Three Step Pathway
Famous quotes containing the words control and/or analysis:
“... the black girls didn’t get these pills because their black ministers were up on the pulpit saying that birth control pills were black genocide. What I’m saying is that black men have exploited black women.... They didn’t want them to have any choice about their reproductive health. And if you can’t control your reproduction, you can’t control your life.”
—Joycelyn Elders (b. 1933)
“The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)