Catalysis in Reaction Networks

If networks of chemical reactions are the circuits of biology then catalysts are the switches. But which species should be called catalysts? Chemistry textbooks answer this question when there is a single reaction. For an entire network of reactions , the concept becomes more nuanced, and has been worked out in a recent paper (arXiv:1006.3627). I will discuss this notion of catalysis for reaction networks, and illustrate it with an example from the "seesaw gate" of Qian and Winfree ( http://www.dna.caltech.edu/DNAresearch_publications.html#SeesawTheory ), which is a motif for engineering large reaction networks out of DNA molecules.

Prerequisites: You should know what a graph is, what a monomial is, what the greatest common divisor of two monomials is, and what DNA is.

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