ABSTRACT
The approach to modelling cellular systems used in this book is to develop models of the individual biochemical and biophysical processes, such as enzymic reactions and ion transport processes, and to collect these together to describe the system as a whole. Models of real cellular systems can become extremely complicated when constructed in this way. For example, the model of the red blood cell described in Chapter 7 contains 60 state variables (metabolites) and 270 parameters. Such systems are often said to be overparameterized with respect to the available experimental data. This is because in order to be able to estimate all the parameters in the model with a high degree of certainty, we need to follow all the independent state variables in the system during a very large number of experiments that involve system perturbations. Current experimental techniques do not enable this for most cellular systems. In other words, the rich parameterization of these models, combined with only sparse experimental data, does not allow reliable estimation of all the relevant parameter values.
