Dynamical compensation in biological systems as a particular case of structural non-identifiability

Abstract: Dynamical compensation (DC) has been recently defined as the ability of a biological system to keep its output dynamics unchanged in the face of varying parameters. This concept is purported to describe a design principle that provides robustness to physiological circuits. Here we note the similitude between DC and Structural Identifiability (SI), and we argue that the former can be explained in terms of (lack of) the latter. We propose to exploit this fact by using currently existing tools for SI analysis to perform DC analysis. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach with four physiological circuits, for which we confirm the correspondence between DC and lack of SI. We also warn that care should we taken when using an unidentifiable model to extract biological insight, since lack of SI can be the result of an inappropriate choice of model structure and therefore not necessarily a sign of biological robustness.