Traditional chemical kinetics may be inappropriate to describe chemical reactions in microdomains involving only a small number of substrate and reactant molecules. Starting with the stochastic dynamics of the molecules, we derive a master-diffusion equation for the joint probability density of a mobile reactant and the number of bound substrate in a confined domain. We use the equation to calculate the fluctuations in the number of bound substrate molecules as a function of initial reacant distribution. A second model is presented based on a Markov description of the binding and. unbinding and on the mean first passage time of a molecule to a small portion of the boundary. These models can be used for the description of noise due to gating of ionic channels by random binding and unbinding of ligands in biological sensor cells, such as olfactory cilia, photoreceptors, hair cells in the cochlea. (c) 2005 American Institute of Physics.
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