ABSTRACT
When a biochemical process contains more than one sort of proteins, molecules or chemical complexes, the dynamics take into account the possible interactions between these various chemical species. There are more than 20,000 genes coding for proteins in human cells, which interact with each other in complicated ways. One actual aim of systems biology consists in finding and understanding these interaction networks. One can propose extremely simplified mathematical models, which are, however, able to reproduce some of the observed phenomenon. The chemical reactions described schematically in (1.14) provide a first basic example of a reaction network, involving production and degradation, as well as a switching mechanism. To go further, we first introduce some basic definitions related to more general reaction networks, and then present mathematical results on linear first-order networks.
