Homeostasis and injectivity: a reaction network perspective

Abstract

Homeostasis is a mechanism by which a feature can remain invariant with change in external parameters. We adopt the definition of homeostasis in the context of singularity theory. We make a connection between homeostasis and the theory of injective reaction networks. In particular, we show that a reaction network cannot exhibit homeostasis if a modified reaction network (which we call the homeostasis-associated reaction network) is injective. We provide examples of reaction networks which can or cannot exhibit homeostasis by analyzing the injectivity of the homeostasis-associated reaction network.