Hybrid method for the chemical master equation

The chemical master equation is solved by a hybrid method coupling a macroscopic, deterministic description with a mesoscopic, stochastic model. The molecular species are divided into one subset where the expected values of the number of molecules are computed and one subset with species with a stochastic variation in the number of molecules. The macroscopic equations resemble the reaction rate equations and the probability distribution for the stochastic variables satisfy a master equation. The probability distribution is obtained by the Stochastic Simulation Algorithm due to Gillespie. The equations are coupled via a summation over the mesoscale variables. This summation is approximated by Quasi-Monte Carlo methods. The error in the approximations is analyzed. The hybrid method is applied to three chemical systems from molecular cell biology.