Temperature dependence and temperature compensation of kinetics of chemical oscillations; Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction, glycolysis and circadian rhythms.

Based on the distribution of activation energies around the experimental mean and averaging of rate constants we propose a theoretical scheme to examine the temperature dependence and temperature compensation of time periods of chemical oscillations. The critical finite width of the distribution is characteristic of endogeneous oscillations for compensating kinetics as observed in circadian oscillations, while the vanishing width corresponds to Arrhenius temperature dependent kinetics of non-endogeneous chemical oscillation in Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction in a CSTR or glycolysis in cell-free yeast extracts. Our theoretical analysis is corroborated with experimental data.