Predicting rare events in chemical reactions: application to skin cell proliferation
arXiv:1005.4116 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.82.021103
Abstract
In a well-stirred system undergoing chemical reactions, fluctuations in the reaction propensities are approximately captured by the corresponding chemical Langevin equation. Within this context, we discuss in this work how the Kramers escape theory can be used to predict rare events in chemical reactions. As an example, we apply our approach to a recently proposed model on cell proliferation with relevance to skin cancer [P.B. Warren, Phys. Rev. E {\bf 80}, 030903 (2009)]. In particular, we provide an analytical explanation for the form of the exponential exponent observed in the onset rate of uncontrolled cell proliferation.
New materials and references added. To appear in Physical Review E
References in corpus (5)
- Coexistence versus extinction in the stochastic cyclic Lotka-Volterra model
- Extinction Rates for Fluctuation-Induced Metastabilities : A Real-Space WKB Approach
- Disease extinction in the presence of non-Gaussian noise
- Extinction of an infectious disease: a large fluctuation in a non-equilibrium system
- Kinetics of cell division in epidermal maintenance