Steady-state joint distribution for first-order stochastic reaction kinetics

Abstract: While the analytical solution for the marginal distribution of a stochastic chemical reaction network has been extensively studied, its joint distribution, i.e. the solution of a high-dimensional chemical master equation, has received much less attention. Here we develop a novel method of computing the exact joint distributions of a wide class of first-order stochastic reaction systems in steady-state conditions. The effectiveness of our method is validated by applying it to four gene expression models of biological significance, including models with 2A peptides, nascent mRNA, gene regulation, translational bursting, and alternative splicing.