  Chemical reaction systems operating in nonequilibrium open-system states
arise in a great number of contexts, including the study of living organisms,
in which chemical reactions, in general, are far from equilibrium. Here we
introduce a theorem that relates forward and re-verse fluxes and free energy
for any chemical process operating in a steady state. This rela-tionship, which
is a generalization of equilibrium conditions to the case of a chemical process
occurring in a nonequilibrium steady state, provides a novel equivalent
definition for chemical reaction free energy. In addition, it is shown that
previously unrelated theories introduced by Ussing and Hodgkin and Huxley for
transport of ions across membranes, Hill for catalytic cycle fluxes, and Crooks
for entropy production in microscopically reversible systems, are united in a
common framework based on this relationship.
