Cao2008 - Network of a toggle switch

Youfang Cao & Jie Liang. Optimal enumeration of state space of finitely buffered stochastic molecular networks and exact computation of steady state landscape probability. BMC Systems Biology 2 (2008).

Stochasticity plays important roles in many molecular networks when molecular concentrations are in the range of 0.1 muM to 10nM (about 100 to 10 copies in a cell). The chemical master equation provides a fundamental framework for studying these networks, and the time-varying landscape probability distribution over the full microstates, i.e., the combination of copy numbers of molecular species, provide a full characterization of the network dynamics. A complete characterization of the space of the microstates is a prerequisite for obtaining the full landscape probability distribution of a network. However, there are neither closed-form solutions nor algorithms fully describing all microstates for a given molecular network.