Finding all steady state solutions of chemical kinetic models

Ordinary differential equations are used frequently by theoreticians to model kinetic process in chemistry and biology. These systems can have stable and unstable steady states and oscillations. This paper presents an algorithm to find all steady state solutions to a restricted class of ODE models, for which the right-hand sides are linear combinations of rational functions of variables and parameters. The algorithm converts the steady state equations into a system of polynomial equations and uses a globally convergent homotopy method to find all the roots of the system of polynomials. All steady state solutions of the original ODEs are guaranteed to be present as roots of the polynomial equations. The conversion may generate some spurious roots that do not correspond to steady state solutions. The stability properties of the steady states are not revealed. This paper explains the algorithms used and gives results for a cell cycle modeling problem.