Bioinformatics Applications Note Systems Biology Genssi: a Software Toolbox for Structural Identifiability Analysis of Biological Models

Summary: Mathematical modeling has a key role in systems biology. Model building is often regarded as an iterative loop involving several tasks, among which the estimation of unknown parameters of the model from a certain set of experimental data is of central importance. This problem of parameter estimation has many possible pitfalls, and modelers should be very careful to avoid them. Many of such difficulties arise from a fundamental (yet often overlooked) property: the so-called structural (or a priori) identifiability, which considers the uniqueness of the estimated parameters. Obviously, the structural identifiability of any tentative model should be checked at the beginning of the model building loop. However, checking this property for arbitrary non-linear dynamic models is not an easy task. Here we present a software toolbox, GenSSI (Generating Series for testing Structural Identifiability), which enables non-expert users to carry out such analysis. The toolbox runs under the popular MATLAB environment and is accompanied by detailed documentation and relevant examples. Availability: The GenSSI toolbox and the related documentation are available at http://www.iim.csic.es/%7Egenssi. Contact: ebalsa@iim.csic.es