Stability of biochemical reaction networks with general kinetics and distributed time delays

Abstract Distributed delays play an important role in biological modeling, and are often inevitable to obtain a sufficiently precise quantitative description of certain important processes. It is known from previous studies that mass-action type complex balanced chemical reaction networks (CRNs) containing distributed delays are stable. In this paper, we consider complex balanced biochemical reaction networks with distributed delays, containing a general class of reaction rates including Michaelis–Menten and Hill-type kinetics. We show that for integrable delay distributions defined on a finite time interval, there exists precisely one equilibrium in each stoichiometric compatibility class. The local stability of the equilibria is shown using a logarithmic Lyapunov–Krasovski functional. The theoretical results are demonstrated through two illustrative examples.