Toward endosymbiosis modeling using reaction networks

Endosymbiosis is a type of symbiosis where one species inhabits another species, and both are benefited. It is not trivial to develop models of endosymbiosis because the interaction might involve complex mechanisms, consisting of various steps, and occurring at different levels of the organisms activity. Reaction networks can be applied to model complex ecological interaction mechanisms that can hardly be represented by traditional network approaches. Namely, entities of the reaction network represent either ecological species, resources, or conditions for the ecological interactions to happen, and ecological interaction mechanisms are represented by sequences of reactions (processes) in the reaction network. Hence, an ecological interaction is modeled as a reaction pathway. In this article, we present a mechanistic model of an endosymbiotic interaction using reaction networks. The model includes three representation layers at different timescales (intracellular, intercellular and organismic) model of the interaction. As an example, We provide a numerical analysis of the effects of the endosymbiotic interaction at the intracellular layer.