Noise-induced metastability in biochemical networks

Abstract

Intracellular biochemical reactions exhibit a rich dynamical phenomenology which cannot be explained within the framework of mean-field rate equations and additive noise. Here, we show that the presence of metastable states and radically different time scales are general features of a broad class of autocatalytic reaction networks, and that this fact may be exploited to gain analytical results. The latter point is demonstrated by a treatment of the paradigmatic Togashi-Kaneko reaction, which has resisted theoretical analysis for the last decade.