Mechanisms of stochastic focusing and defocusing in biological reaction networks: Insight from accurate Chemical Master Equation (ACME) solutions

Abstract

Stochasticity plays important roles in regulation of biochemical reaction networks when the copy numbers of molecular species are small. Studies based on Stochastic Simulation Algorithm (SSA) has shown that a basic reaction system can display stochastic focusing (SF) by increasing the sensitivity of the network as a result of the signal noise. Although SSA has been widely used to study stochastic networks, it is ineffective in examining rare events and this becomes a significant issue when the tails of probability distributions are relevant as is the case of SF. Here we use the ACME method to solve the exact solution of the discrete Chemical Master Equations and to study a network where SF was reported. We showed that the level of SF depends on the degree of the fluctuations of signal molecule. We discovered that signaling noise under certain conditions in the same reaction network can lead to a decrease in the system sensitivities, thus the network can experience stochastic defocusing. These results highlight the fundamental role of stochasticity in biological reaction networks and the need for exact computation of probability landscape of the molecules in the system.