What is a chemostat? Insights from hybrid dynamics and stochastic thermodynamics

Abstract: At the microscopic scale, open chemical reaction networks are described by stochastic reactions that follow mass-action kinetics and are coupled to chemostats. We show that closed chemical reaction networks -- with specific stoichiometries imposed by mass-action kinetics -- behave like open ones in the limit where the abundances of a subset of species become macroscopic, thus playing the role of chemostats. We prove that this limit is thermodynamically consistent by recovering the local detailed balance condition of open chemical reaction networks and deriving the proper expression of the entropy production rate. In particular, the entropy production rate features two contributions: one accounting for the dissipation of the stochastic reactions, the other for the dissipation of continuous reactions controlling the chemostats. Finally, we illustrate our results for two prototypical examples.