How to desynchronize quorum-sensing networks

Abstract

In this paper we investigate how so-called quorum-sensing networks can be desynchronized. Such networks, which arise in many important application fields, such as systems biology, are characterized by the fact that direct communication between network nodes is superimposed to communication with a shared, environmental variable. In particular, we provide a new sufficient condition ensuring that the trajectories of these quorum-sensing networks diverge from their synchronous evolution. Then, we apply our result to study two applications.