Actions

Complex Systems Summer School 2012-Projects & Working Groups

From Santa Fe Institute Events Wiki

Complex Systems Summer School 2012
  • nonequilibrium game theory --- my plan is to adapt some SFI-based models, by people like Crutchfield and Farmer, so that they will quantitatively or qualitatively reproduce features of real human data. Meet Seth Frey at dinner on Thursday and Friday.
  • Enzyme kinetics – Do enzymes just accelerate equilibrium or play an active role in chemical reactions?

Enzyme networks (e.g. glycolysis) and catalysts in complex mixtures (e.g. Belusov-Zhabotinski reaction) can profoundly influence the outcome of a chemical reaction system. What about a single enzyme? Biochemistry textbooks uniformly say that an enzyme accelerates a reaction without altering its outcome. Yet, the set of differential equations that generically describes enzyme catalysis has remarkable resemblance to the Roessler equations (a textbook example of a non-linear, complex system). With a fixed substrate input or a steady substrate flow, a single enzyme probably cannot affect the reaction outcome. However, sinusoidal or pulsating substrate input, substrate activation or product inhibition, coupling of two enzymes could turn the reaction pattern non-linear. For this project, the sets of equations to study are quite well established – they need to be analyzed. In contrast to some of the more ambitious ideas circulated, this task is exhaustively doable in less than four weeks. I am Georg Weber. If you are interested in studying this problem, please find me on Tuesday over lunch or dinner (or talk to me at any other unstructured time).

  • next idea here

"Small Steps and Big Ideas" Group