A stochastic approach to studying biochemical reactions without Monte Carlo simulations

The time evolution of molecular species in a biochemical system is a discrete-state continuous-time Markov process, which can be described by a chemical master equation. The traditional methods for solving the chemical master equation are based on Monte Carlo methods, such as the stochastic simulation algorithm (SSA). In prior work, we proposed a method for simulation of the time evolution based on the propagation of the first two moments of the molecules in the biochemical system over time. In this paper we present a generalization of our previous result. We also compare our method with other methods such as the stochastic hybrid systems (SHS).