Uniform Approximation of Solutions by Elimination of Intermediate Species in Deterministic Reaction Networks

Abstract: Chemical reactions often proceed through the formation and the consumption of intermediate species. An example is the creation and subsequent degradation of the substrate-enzyme complexes in an enzymatic reaction. In this paper we provide a setting, based on ordinary differential equations, in which the presence of intermediate species has little effect on the overall dynamics of a biological system. The result provides a method to perform model reduction by elimination of intermediate species. We study the problem in a multiscale setting, where the species abundances as well a the reaction rates scale to different orders of magnitudes. The different time and concentration scales are parameterised by a single parameter $N$. We show that a solution to the original reaction system is uniformly approximated on compact time intervals to a solution of a reduced reaction system without intermediates and to a solution of a certain limiting reaction systems, which does not depend on $N$. Known approximation techniques such as the theorems by Tikhonov and Fenichel cannot readily be used in this framework.