Overshoot in biological systems modeled by Markov chains: a nonequilibrium dynamic phenomenon

A number of biological systems can be modeled by Markov chains. Recently, there has been an increasing concern about when biological systems modeled by Markov chains will perform a dynamic phenomenon called overshoot. In this article, we found that the steady-state behavior of the system will have a great effect on the occurrence of overshoot. We confirmed that overshoot in general cannot occur in systems which will finally approach an equilibrium steady state. We further classified overshoot into two types, named as simple overshoot and oscillating overshoot. We showed that except for extreme cases, oscillating overshoot will occur if the system is far from equilibrium. All these results clearly show that overshoot is a nonequilibrium dynamic phenomenon with energy consumption. In addition, the main result in this article is validated with real experimental data.