Global stability of Michaelis-Menten networks

Overview & Synopsis

In a very nice paper, Blanchini, Breda, Giordano and Liessi studied networks of species coupled through Michaelis-Menten interactions. Under standard assumptions of strong connectedness and non-degeneracy, they show that there is a unique equilibrium, which is (locally) asymptotically stable. This note shows that global stability, which was stated there as an open problem, holds as well. In fact, whenever a positive equilibrium exists, it attracts every solution with positive initial condition, with no connectedness or non-degeneracy hypothesis at all; those assumptions are needed only in order to guarantee existence and to cover solutions starting on the boundary of the orthant. The key is to note that the system is contractive with respect to the Thompson part metric.