Switch dynamics for stochastic model of genetic toggle switch

Abstract

Recently, more and more biological experiments have indicated that noise plays an important role in bistable systems, such as the case of the bimodal population distribution in the genetic toggle switch. In this paper, we further verify that noises in degradation rates can indeed induce switching in the genetic toggle switch. Meanwhile, we apply the theory of mean first passage time (MFPT) in high dimensional system to the above stochastic model. According to our assumption, the high order finite difference method is used to compute the MFPT (that the average time switching from one steady state to the other) and we find that the relationship between the MFPT and noise intensity is negative correlation. The result is also verified through another numerical simulation method.