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M. Fürst:
"Hysteresis in the AKT signaling pathway";
Betreuer/in(nen): G. Schütz; Institut für Angewandte Physik (E134), 2016; Abschlussprüfung: 19.01.2016.

Life and function of eukaryotic cells are governed by metabolic and signaling
pathways. These pathways are constituted by a multitude of organic molecules.
Many of these systems exhibit highly nonlinear behavior, caused by di erent
combinations of feedback loops, feedforward loops et cetera. Possible behaviors
include bistability, hypersensitivity, robustness and complex dose-responsecurves.
These circumstances increase the di culty of designing drugs for e.g.
cancer treatments and predicting their e ectiveness. In a recent study, D.G.
Miguez observed an inverted hysteresis loop when treating the AKT-pathway
with the small-molecule inhibitor ZSTK ([32]). The main objective of this
thesis was to build a biologically sound, mathematical model to understand
the observed behavior. Furthermore, we tried to reproduce the experiments
using a di erent method