Abstract
This year we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the law of mass action. This law is often assumed to have been “there” forever, but it has its own history, background, and a definite starting point. The law has had an impact on chemistry, biochemistry, biomathematics, and systems biology that is difficult to overestimate. It is easily recognized that it is the direct basis for computational enzyme kinetics, ecological systems models, and models for the spread of diseases. The article reviews the explicit and implicit role of the law of mass action in systems biology and reveals how the original, more general formulation of the law emerged one hundred years later ab initio as a very general, canonical representation of biological processes.
Highlights
Some things seem timeless, they seem to have been with mankind forever
In the field of computational chemistry and biochemistry, the same attribute appears to apply to the law of mass action
Instead of designing patches for the existing ad hoc approaches, Savageau proposed a new framework he called Biochemical Systems Theory (BST) [31,39,40,41] that was partially inspired by mass action functions and by Bode analysis, which is used in electrical engineering and linearizes arbitrary nonlinear functions upon logarithmic transformation in a piecewise manner [40]
Summary
Some things seem timeless, they seem to have been with mankind forever. Several authors discussed time-dependent rate constants or suggested realvalued kinetic orders, especially for species in reactions that are constrained to one or two dimensions or occur under conditions of molecular crowding, where the best process representation appears to be fractal kinetics [26,27,28,29].
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