No Arabic abstract
Persistence and permanence are properties of dynamical systems that describe the long-term behavior of the solutions, and in particular specify whether positive solutions approach the boundary of the positive orthant. Mass-action systems (or more generally power-law systems) are very common in chemistry, biology, and engineering, and are often used to describe the dynamics in interaction networks. We prove that two-species mass-action systems derived from weakly reversible networks are both persistent and permanent, for any values of the reaction rate parameters. Moreover, we prove that a larger class of networks, called endotactic networks, also give rise to permanent systems, even if we allow the reaction rate parameters to vary in time. These results also apply to power-law systems and other nonlinear dynamical systems. In addition, ideas behind these results allow us to prove the Global Attractor Conjecture for three-species systems.
A persistent dynamical system in $mathbb{R}^d_{> 0}$ is one whose solutions have positive lower bounds for large $t$, while a permanent dynamical system in $mathbb{R}^d_{> 0}$ is one whose solutions have uniform upper and lower bounds for large $t$. These properties have important applications for the study of mathematical models in biochemistry, cell biology, and ecology. Inspired by reaction network theory, we define a class of polynomial dynamical systems called tropically endotactic. We show that two-dimensional tropically endotactic polynomial dynamical systems are permanent, irrespective of the values of (possibly time-dependent) parameters in these systems. These results generalize the permanence of two-dimensional reversible, weakly reversible, and endotactic mass action systems.
This paper concerns the long-term behavior of population systems, and in particular of chemical reaction systems, modeled by deterministic mass-action kinetics. We approach two important open problems in the field of Chemical Reaction Network Theory, the Persistence Conjecture and the Global Attractor Conjecture. We study the persistence of a large class of networks called lower-endotactic and in particular, we show that in weakly reversible mass-action systems with two-dimensional stoichiometric subspace all bounded trajectories are persistent. Moreover, we use these ideas to show that the Global Attractor Conjecture is true for systems with three-dimensional stoichiometric subspace.
The fundamental decomposition of a chemical reaction network (also called its $mathscr{F}$-decomposition) is the set of subnetworks generated by the partition of its set of reactions into the fundamental classes introduced by Ji and Feinberg in 2011 as the basis of their higher deficiency algorithm for mass action systems. The first part of this paper studies the properties of the $mathscr{F}$-decomposition, in particular, its independence (i.e., the networks stoichiometric subspace is the direct sum of the subnetworks stoichiometric subspaces) and its incidence-independence (i.e., the image of the networks incidence map is the direct sum of the incidence maps images of the subnetworks). We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for these properties and identify network classes where the $mathscr{F}$-decomposition coincides with other known decompositions. The second part of the paper applies the above-mentioned results to improve the Multistationarity Algorithm for power-law kinetic systems (MSA), a general computational approach that we introduced in previous work. We show that for systems with non-reactant determined interactions but with an independent $mathscr{F}$-decomposition, the transformation to a dynamically equivalent system with reactant-determined interactions -- required in the original MSA -- is not necessary. We illustrate this improvement with the subnetwork of Schmitzs carbon cycle model recently analyzed by Fortun et al.
Multivector fields provide an avenue for studying continuous dynamical systems in a combinatorial framework. There are currently two approaches in the literature which use persistent homology to capture changes in combinatorial dynamical systems. The first captures changes in the Conley index, while the second captures changes in the Morse decomposition. However, such approaches have limitations. The former approach only describes how the Conley index changes across a selected isolated invariant set though the dynamics can be much more complicated than the behavior of a single isolated invariant set. Likewise, considering a Morse decomposition omits much information about the individual Morse sets. In this paper, we propose a method to summarize changes in combinatorial dynamical systems by capturing changes in the so-called Conley-Morse graphs. A Conley-Morse graph contains information about both the structure of a selected Morse decomposition and about the Conley index at each Morse set in the decomposition. Hence, our method summarizes the changing structure of a sequence of dynamical systems at a finer granularity than previous approaches.
We introduce a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) framework capable of determining whether a chemical reaction network possesses the property of being endotactic or strongly endotactic. The network property of being strongly endotactic is known to lead to persistence and permanence of chemical species under genetic kinetic assumptions, while the same result is conjectured but as yet unproved for general endotactic networks. The algorithms we present are the first capable of verifying endotacticity of chemical reaction networks for systems with greater than two constituent species. We implement the algorithms in the open-source online package CoNtRol and apply them to several well-studied biochemical examples, including the general $n$-site phosphorylation / dephosphorylation networks and a circadian clock mechanism.