Stochastically-induced bistability in chemical reaction systems

Abstract

We study a stochastic two-species chemical reaction system with two mechanisms. One mechanism consists of chemical interactions which govern the overall drift of species amounts in the system; the other mechanism consists of resampling, branching or splitting which makes unbiased perturbative changes to species amounts. Our results show that in a system with a large but bounded capacity, certain combinations of these two types of interactions can lead to stochastically-induced bistability. Depending on the relative magnitudes of the rates of these two sets of interactions, bistability can occur in two distinct ways with different dynamical signatures.