chapter-11

Abstract:

Complex dynamical reaction networks consisting of many molecular species are difficult to understand, especially, when new species may appear and present species may vanish completely. This chapter outlines a technique to deal with such systems. The first part introduces the concept of a chemical organisation as a closed and self-maintaining set of molecular species. This concept allows to map a complex (reaction) network to its set of organisations, providing a new view on the system’s structure. The second part connects dynamics with the set of organisations, which allows to map a movement of the system in state space to a movement in the set of organisations. The relevancy of this approach is underlined by a theorem that says that given a differential equation describing the chemical dynamics of the network, then every stationary state is an instance of an organisation. Finally, the relation between pathways and chemical organisations is sketched