Sharpness characterizes Hill functions

Abstract

While long treated as empirical fits, Hill functions have been postulated to be the universal Hopfield barrier for sharpness of input-output responses by Martinez-Corral, Nam, DePace, and Gunawardena. A Hopfield barrier is a fundamental limit on how well biological systems can process information without expending energy. Their case rested on numerical findings for Hill coefficients $4$ and $6$. We give a precise formulation and proof of this: measuring sharpness by the supremum of the derivative in semi-log scale, any rational function $r(x)=(\alpha_0+\alpha_1 x+ \cdots +\alpha_n x^n)/(\beta_0 + \beta_1 x+ \cdots + \beta_n x^n)$ with real coefficients $0\leq \alpha_i\leq \beta_i$ has sharpness at most $n/4$, with equality if and only if $r$ is a Hill function with Hill coefficient $n$.