Convergence of stochastic gene networks to hybrid piecewise deterministic processes (Q691103)

The asymptotic behavior of Markov processes describing biochemical reactions is investigated in the case, where the number of some reagents molecules is small and some reagents are present in large numbers (tending to infinity). The limit processes are piecewise deterministic processes (PDPs). Different types of PDPs are considered which arise under different limit assumptions, e.g., THE continuous PDP has continuous trajectories which evolve according to a differential equation with coefficients controlled by a Markov jump process. The other considered types are PDPs with jumps, averaged PDPs and discontinuous PDPs with singular switching. The proofs of limit theorems are based on the martingale representation of Markov processes. The authors propose to use limit PDPs as models of stochastic gene expression.