Emergent L\'evy behavior in single-cell stochastic gene expression
Abstract
Single-cell gene expression is inherently stochastic; its emergent behavior can be defined in terms of the chemical master equation describing the evolution of the mRNA and protein copy numbers as the latter tends to infinity. We establish two types of "macroscopic limits": the Kurtz limit is consistent with the classical chemical kinetics, while the L\'{e}vy limit provides a theoretical foundation for an empirical equation proposed in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 97:168302, 2006]. Furthermore, we clarify the biochemical implications and ranges of applicability for various macroscopic limits and calculate a comprehensive analytic expression for the protein concentration distribution in autoregulatory gene networks. The relationship between our work and modern population genetics is discussed.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1708.05938,
title = {Emergent L\'evy behavior in single-cell stochastic gene expression},
author = {Chen Jia and Michael Q. Zhang and Hong Qian},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.05938},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
10 pages, 2 figures