Chaos in an enzyme reaction

Abstract

DYNAMIC systems are usually thought to have either monotonic or periodic behaviour. Although the possibility of other types of behaviour has been recognised for many years, the existence of non-monotonic, non-periodic behaviour in dynamic systems has been firmly established only recently. It is termed chaotic behaviour. A review on the rapidly expanding literature on chaos in discrete model systems described by difference equations has been published by May¹. Rössler², on the other hand, has discussed a few published works on systems of differential equations with chaotic solutions, and he has proposed a three-component chemical model system which he argues has chaotic solutions. The argument is based on a theorem by Li and Yorke³. Here we report the finding of chaotic behaviour as an experimental result in an enzyme system (peroxidase). Like Rössler² we base our identification of chaos on the theorem by Li and Yorke³.