How to desynchronize quorum-sensing networks

Abstract

In this paper we investigate how so-called quorum-sensing networks can be de-synchronized. Such networks, which arise in many important application fields such as systems biology, are characterized by the fact that direct communication between network nodes is superimposed to communication with a shared, environmental, variable. In particular, we provide a new sufficient condition ensuring that the trajectories of these quorum-sensing networks diverge from their synchronous evolution. Then, we apply our result to study two applications.