title: 150 years of the mass action law.
abstract: This year we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the law of mass action. This law is often assumed to have been "there" forever, but it has its own history, background, and a definite starting point. The law has had an impact on chemistry, biochemistry, biomathematics, and systems biology that is difficult to overestimate. It is easily recognized that it is the direct basis for computational enzyme kinetics, ecological systems models, and models for the spread of diseases. The article reviews the explicit and implicit role of the law of mass action in systems biology and reveals how the original, more general formulation of the law emerged one hundred years later ab initio as a very general, canonical representation of biological processes.
authors.affiliation: Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Tech and Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America.
authors.forename: Eberhard O
authors.initials: EO
authors.lastname: Voit
authors.affiliation: Department of Engineering Cybernetics, Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
authors.forename: Harald A
authors.initials: HA
authors.lastname: Martens
authors.affiliation: Department of Engineering Cybernetics, Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
authors.forename: Stig W
authors.initials: SW
authors.lastname: Omholt
mesh_terms: D001669:Biochemical Phenomena; D007700:Kinetics; D008954:Models, Biological; D049490:Systems Biology