Stochastically-induced bistability in chemical reaction systems (Q2454409)

A model of biochemical reaction systems is considered in which chemical interactions of individual molecules are modeled by continuous time Markov jump processes and stochastic biological effects of resampling or cell splitting are taken into account. The authors analyze the limit behavior of the system when its size tends to infinity. It is shown that bistability in the system behavior can occur by two ways. In the first case of ``rare'' splitting/resampling, the quasi-stable states are determined by the drift of the deterministic approximation for the chemical interaction model. In the case of ``fast'' splitting/resampling, the quasi-stable states correspond to two extremes for the size of the system.