Stochastic analysis of a miRNA-protein toggle switch

Within systems biology there is an increasing interest in the stochastic behavior of genetic and biochemical reaction networks. An appropriate stochastic description is provided by the chemical master equation, which represents a continuous time Markov chain (CTMC). In this paper we consider the stochastic properties of a toggle switch, involving a protein compound (E2Fs and Myc) and a miRNA cluster (miR-17-92), known to control the eukaryotic cell cycle and possibly involved in oncogenesis, recently proposed in the literature within a deterministic framework. Due to the inherent stochasticity of biochemical processes and the small number of molecules involved, the stochastic approach should be more correct in describing the real system: we study the agreement between the two approaches by exploring the system parameter space. We address the problem by proposing a simplified version of the model that allows analytical treatment, and by performing numerical simulations for the full model. We observed optimal agreement between the stochastic and the deterministic description of the circuit in a large range of parameters, but some substantial differences arise in at least two cases: (1) when the deterministic system is in the proximity of a transition from a monostable to a bistable configuration, and (2) when bistability (in the deterministic system) is "masked" in the stochastic system by the distribution tails. The approach provides interesting estimates of the optimal number of molecules involved in the toggle switch. Our discussion of the points of strengths, potentiality and weakness of the chemical master equation in systems biology and the differences with respect to deterministic modeling are leveraged in order to provide useful advice for both the bioinformatician and the theoretical scientist.