Noise-induced multistability in chemical systems: Discrete vs Continuum modeling

Abstract

The noisy dynamics of chemical systems is commonly studied using either the chemical master equation (CME) or the chemical Fokker-Planck equation (CFPE). The latter is a continuum approximation of the discrete CME approach. We here show that the CFPE may fail to capture the CME's prediction of noise-induced multistability. In particular we find a simple chemical system for which the CME's marginal probability distribution changes from unimodal to multimodal as the system-size decreases below a critical value, while the CFPE's marginal probability distribution is unimodal for all physically meaningful system sizes.

5 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Analytical distributions for stochastic gene expression
• The complex chemical Langevin equation

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Approximation and inference methods for stochastic biochemical kinetics - a tutorial review