Intra-cellular biochemical reactions exhibit a rich dynamical phenomenology
which cannot be explained within the framework of mean-field rate equations and
additive noise. Here, we show that the presence of metastable states and
radically different timescales are general features of a broad class of
autocatalyic reaction networks, and moreover, that this fact may be exploited
to gain analytical results. The latter point is demonstrated by a treatment of
the paradigmatic Togashi-Kaneko reaction, which has resisted theoretical
analysis for the last decade.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
