Moment Closure Stability Analysis of Stochastic Reaction Networks with Oscillatory Dynamics

Abstract: Biochemical reactions with oscillatory behavior play an essential role in synthetic biology at the microscopic scale. Although a robust stability theory for deterministic chemical oscillators in the macroscopic limit exists, the dynamical stability of stochastic oscillators is an object of ongoing research. The Chemical Master Equation along with kinetic Monte Carlo simulations constitute the most accurate approach to modeling microscopic systems. However, because of the challenges of solving the fully probabilistic model, most studies in stability analysis have focused on the description of externally disturbed oscillators. Here we apply the Maximum Entropy Principle as closure criterion for moment equations of oscillatory networks and perform the stability analysis of the internally disturbed Brusselator network. Particularly, we discuss the effects of kinetic and size parameters on the dynamics of this stochastic oscillatory system with intrinsic noise. Our numerical experiments reveal that changes in kinetic parameters lead to phenomenological and dynamical Hopf bifurcations, while reduced system sizes in the oscillatory region can reverse the stochastic Hopf dynamical bifurcations at the ensemble level. This is a unique feature of the stochastic dynamics of oscillatory systems, with an unknown parallel in the macroscopic limit.