Infinitesimal Homeostasis in Mass-Action Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates the conditions under which biological systems modeled as chemical reaction networks exhibit infinitesimal homeostasis, maintaining output stability despite input fluctuations, by analyzing their mathematical properties with and without conservation laws.

Contribution

It introduces methods to verify infinitesimal homeostasis in chemical reaction networks considering conservation laws and defines infinitesimal concentration robustness.

Findings

Identified criteria for infinitesimal homeostasis in reaction networks

Developed verification techniques for systems with conservation laws

Illustrated results with deterministic and stochastic examples

Abstract

Homeostasis occurs in a biological system when a chosen output variable remains approximately constant despite changes in an input variable. In this work we specifically focus on biological systems which may be represented as chemical reaction networks and consider their infinitesimal homeostasis, where the derivative of the input-output function is zero. The specific challenge of chemical reaction networks is that they often obey various conservation laws complicating the standard input-output analysis. We derive several results that allow to verify the existence of infinitesimal homeostasis points both in the absence of conservation and under conservation laws where conserved quantities serve as input parameters. In particular, we introduce the notion of infinitesimal concentration robustness, where the output variable remains nearly constant despite fluctuations in the conserved quantities. We provide several examples of chemical networks which illustrate our results both in deterministic and stochastic settings.