Estimation of mean first passage time for bursty gene expression

Gene expression is an intrinsically noisy process, typically, producing mRNAs and proteins in bursts. An important description of such stochastic processes can be done in terms of the mean first passage time (MFPT), i.e., the time taken by mRNAs/proteins to reach a particular threshold. We study the role of burstiness on MFPT and obtain an analytical expression for different models of transcriptional and translational bursts. Our analytical results and numerical simulations confirm that MFPT monotonically decreases with burstiness. (paper)