Stochastic modeling of second order reactions using a moment propagation method

The traditional methods for solving the chemical master equation are based on Monte Carlo methods, such as the stochastic simulation algorithm (SSA) and its accelerated versions. Methods for modeling biochemical networks based on moment propagation are a relatively unexplored area. In a prior paper, we addressed first-order reactions and presented a new method for propagating the first two moments of the probability distributions of the number of molecules over time. In this paper we extend this method to second order reactions and demonstrate its performance on some simple networks.