  We have developed a coarse-grained formulation for modeling the dynamic
behavior of cells quantitatively, based on stochasticity and heterogeneity,
rather than on biochemical reactions. We treat each reaction as a
continuous-time stochastic process, while reducing each biochemical quantity to
a binary value at the level of individual cells. The system can be analytically
represented by a finite set of ordinary linear differential equations, which
provides a continuous time course prediction of each molecular state. In this
letter, we introduce our formalism and demonstrate it with several examples.
