Using chemical kinetics to model biochemical pathways.

Chemical kinetics is the study of the rate of reactions transforming some chemical entities into other chemical entities. Over the twentieth century it has become one of the cornerstones of biochemistry. When in the second half of the century basic knowledge of cellular processes became sufficient to understand quantitatively metabolic networks, chemical kinetics associated with systems theory led to the development of what would become an important branch of systems biology. In this chapter we introduce basic concepts of chemical and enzyme kinetics, and show how the temporal evolution of a reaction system can be described by ordinary differential equations. Finally we present a method to apply this type of approach to model any regulatory network.