Stability of the chemostat system with a mutation factor

Abstract: In this paper, we consider a resource-consumer model taking into account a mutation effect between species (with constant mutation rate). The corresponding mutation operator is a discretization of the Laplacian in such a way that the resulting dynamical system can be viewed as a regular perturbation of the classical chemostat system. We prove the existence of a unique locally stable steady-state for every value of the mutation rate and every value of the dilution rate not exceeding a critical value. In addition, we give an expansion of the steady-state in terms of the mutation rate and we prove a uniform persistence property of the dynamics related to each species. Finally, we show that this equilibrium is globally asymptotically stable for every value of the mutation rate provided that the dilution rate is with small enough values.