Center for Quantiative Biological Simulation Microphysiology Gateway

CQBS Research: Biomedical Application Projects

Simulation of oscillating biochemical networks. 
Many metabolic, signaling, and gene regulatory reaction networks include positive and negative feedback loops that can produce oscillations in chemical intermediates. Such oscillations can control the timing of important biological events such as cell division.  At present there is great interest in Systems Biology and the application of simulation methods to biochemical networks.  Key unknowns center on the impact of spatial realism and quantitative and qualitative differences obtained with continuous versus stochastic simulation methods.  We have recently developed new versions of MCell and DReAMM (v3.x), and the new versions are being used to simulate and visualize oscillating biochemical networks such as the Lotka-Volterra reaction, the Oregonator version of the classic Belousov-Zhabotinski reaction, and the Repressilator gene regulatory network.

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