title: Communication: limitations of the stochastic quasi-steady-state approximation in open biochemical reaction networks.
abstract: It is commonly believed that, whenever timescale separation holds, the predictions of reduced chemical master equations obtained using the stochastic quasi-steady-state approximation are in very good agreement with the predictions of the full master equations. We use the linear noise approximation to obtain a simple formula for the relative error between the predictions of the two master equations for the Michaelis-Menten reaction with substrate input. The reduced approach is predicted to overestimate the variance of the substrate concentration fluctuations by as much as 30%. The theoretical results are validated by stochastic simulations using experimental parameter values for enzymes involved in proteolysis, gluconeogenesis, and fermentation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Humboldt University of Berlin, Newtonstr. 15, D-12489 Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Philipp
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Thomas
authors.forename: Arthur V
authors.initials: AV
authors.lastname: Straube
authors.forename: Ramon
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Grima
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D004798:Enzymes / Q000737:chemistry*; D013269:Stochastic Processes
chemical_list: D004798:Enzymes