L\'evy Noise Induced Switch in the Gene Transcriptional Regulatory System

Abstract

Gene transcriptional regulatory is an inherently noisy process. In this paper, the study of fluctuations in a gene transcriptional regulatory system is extended to the case of L\'evy noise, a kind of non-Gaussian noises which can describe unpredictable jump changes of the random environment. The stationary probability density is given to explore the key roles of L\'evy noise in the gene regulatory networks. The results demonstrate that the parameters of L\'evy noise, including noise intensity, stability index and skewness parameter can induce switches between distinct gene-expression states. A further concern is the switching time (from the high concentration state to the low concentration one or from the low concentration state to the high concentration one), which is a random variable and often referred to as the mean first passage time. The effects of L\'evy noise in expression time and degradation time is studied by computing the mean first passage time in two directions and a number of different peculiarities of non-Gaussian L\'evy noise compared with Gaussian noise are observed.