Stochastic kinetic modeling of vesicular stomatitis virus intracellular growth.

By building kinetic models of biological networks one may advance the development of new modeling approaches while gaining insights into the biology. We focus here on building a stochastic kinetic model for the intracellular growth of vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), a well-studied virus that encodes five genes. The essential network of VSV reactions creates challenges to stochastic simulation owing to (i) delayed reactions associated with transcription and genome replication, (ii) production of large numbers of intermediate proteins by translation, and (iii) the presence of highly reactive intermediates that rapidly fluctuate in their intracellular levels.