I have just written a paper with Stefan Disselnkötter on stationary solutions of models for the Calvin cycle and their stability. There we concentrate on the simplest models for this biological system. There were already some analytical results available on the number of positive stationary solutions (let us call them steady states for short), with the result that this number is zero, one or two in various circumstances. We were able to extend these results, in particular showing that in a model of Zhu et. al. there can be two steady states or, in exceptional cases, a continuum of steady states. This is at first sight surprising since those authors stated that there is at most one steady state. However they impose the condition that the steady states should be ‘physiologically feasible’. In fact for their investigations, which are done by means of computer calculations, they assume among other things that certain Michaelis constants which occur as parameters in the system have specific numerical values. This assumption is biologically motivated but at the moment I do not understand how the numbers they give follow from the references they quote. In any case, if these values are assumed our work gives an analytical proof that there is at most one steady state.
While there are quite a lot of results in the literature on the number of steady states in systems of ODE modelling biochemical systems there is much less on the question of the stability of these steady states. It was a central motivation of our work to make some progress in this direction for the specific models of the Calvin cycle and to develop some ideas to approaching this type of question more generally. One key idea is that if it can be shown that there is bifurcation with a one-dimensional centre manifold this can be very helpful in getting information on the stability of steady states which arise in the bifurcation. Given enough information on a sufficient number of derivatives at the bifurcation point this is a standard fact. What is interesting and perhaps less well known is that it may be possible to get conclusions without having such detailed control. One type of situation occurring in our paper is one where a stable solution and a saddle arise. This is roughly the situation of a fold bifurcation but we do not prove that it is generic. Doing so would presumably involve heavy calculations.
The centre manifold calculation only controls one eigenvalue and the other important input in order to see that there is a stable steady state for at least some choice of the parameters is to prove that the remaining eigenvalues have negative real parts. This is done by considering a limiting case where the linearization simplifies and then choosing parameters close to those of the limiting case. The arguments in this paper show how wise it can be to work with the rates of the reactions as long as possible, without using species concentrations. This kind of approach is popular with many people – it has just taken me a long time to get the point.
Hydrobates 