Modelling noise in biochemical reaction networks

It is now well appreciated that noise pervades the dynamics of intracellular reaction kinetics. Intrinsic noise is typical inside cells because of the inherent low copy number of several types of molecules. Equally important though much less studied are extrinsic sources of noise such as temporal variability in the ribosome number per cell and in the concentration of macromolecular crowding agents in the cytoplasm. Modelling is an important tool in Systems Biology to study how the interplay of these various noise sources impacts the dynamics on cellular and multi-cellular scales.