Mutation in autocatalytic reaction networks. An analysis based on perturbation theory.

A class of kinetic equations describing catalysed and template induced replication, and mutation is introduced. This ODE in its most general form is split into two vector fields, a replication and a mutation field. The mutation field is considered as a perturbation of the replicator equation. The perturbation expansion is a Taylor series in a mutation parameter lambda. First, second and higher order contributions are computed by means of the conventional Rayleigh-Schrödinger approach. Qualitative shift in the positions of rest points and limit cycles on the boundary of the physically meaningful part of concentration space are predicted from flow topologies. The results of the topological analysis are summarized in two theorems which turned out to be useful in applications: the rest point migration theorem (RPM) and the limit cycle migration theorem (LCM). Quantitative expressions for the shifts of rest points are computed directly from the perturbation expansion. The concept is applied to a collection of selected examples from biophysical chemistry and biology.