It is possible to solve (29b) asymptotically, and we will develop strategies for doing this in the upcoming sections. The advantage of the MM equations (29a)-(29b) over the mass action equations (7a)-(7d) resides in the fact that the model equations have been reduced from a four-dimensional autonomous system to a two-dimensional autonomous system. Moreover, a reduction in the number of parameters also follows since the MM equations contain four parameters (K M1 , V 1 , K M2 and V 2 ) compared to the original six: k 1 , k -1 , k 2 , k 3 , k -3 and k 4 . Presumably, if K M2 and V 2 are known a priori, then in an ideal experiment one would only need to find V 1 and K M1 .