PLMaddon: a power-law module for the MatlabTM SBToolbox

PLMaddon is a General Public License (GPL) software module designed to expand the current version of the SBToolbox (a Matlab toolbox for systems biology; www.sbtoolbox.org) with a set of functions for the analysis of power-law models, a specific class of kinetic models, set in ordinary differential equations (ODE) and in which the kinetic orders can have positive/negative non-integer values. The module includes functions to generate power-law Taylor expansions of other ODE models (e.g. Michaelis-Menten type models), as well as algorithms to estimate steady-states. The robustness and sensitivity of the models can also be analysed and visualized by computing the power-law's logarithmic gains and sensitivities.