Stability diagram for a three parabolic equation system coming from biochemistry (Q1174655)

The author establishes a reaction-diffusion model for the transport of a substrate against the gradient of an electrochemical potential, by introducing a spatial distribution of immobilized enzymes within a membrane, their activities being regulated by \(pH\)-gradients. The principal structure can be described by three equations, two enzymatic equations for the reaction with the substrate and the protonized substrate, and one equation for the spontaneous deprotonizing. After introducing suitable variables, these equations take the vectorial form: \[ u_ t=Du_{xx}+B\cdot f(u); \;\;u(0,t)=u(1,t)=u_ 0, \;\;u(x,0)=u_ 0,\;\text{with} u'=(S_ 1,S_ 2,H^ +-OH^ -)/K, \] \(K\) the Michaelis constant of substrate \(S_ 1\), \(S_ 2\) the protonized substrate (i.e., the resp. concentration), \(D\) diagonal matrix of the normalized diffusion constants, \(B=diag(-1,1,1)\) and \(f\) depending nonlinearly on all three components of \(u\), as it is known from enzymatic reactions, and being Lipschitzian. The major part of the paper consists in a stability analysis of the linearized form of the equation in the neighbourhood of a stationary solution \(u\). Especially the necessary conditions for bifurcation of stationary and of periodic solutions are given explicitly in terms of parameters, which in turn can be obtained by manifolds of chemical parameters, such that a practical interpretation seems not to be possible.