Abstract

Co-author: Mustafa Khammash (ETH Zurich)

The internal dynamics of a living cell is generally very noisy. An important source of this noise is the intermittency of reactions among various molecular species in the cell. The role of this noise is commonly studied using stochastic models for reaction networks, where the dynamics is described by a continuous-time Markov chain whose states represent the molecular counts of various species. In this talk we will discuss how the long-term behavior of such Markov chains can be assessed using a blend of ideas from probability theory, linear algebra and optimisation theory. In particular we will describe how many biomolecular networks can be viewed as generalised birth-death networks, which leads to a simple computational framework for determining their stability properties such as ergodicity and convergence of moments. We demonstrate the wide-applicability of our framework using many examples from Systems and Synthetic Biology. We also discuss how our results can hel p in analysing regulatory circuits within cells and in understanding the entrainment properties of noisy biomolecular oscillators.