Multiscale Simulation of Cellular Calcium Signalling
- Research Team
- Dan Mason
- Investigators
- Hans Fangohr, Jonathan Essex
Multiscale modelling: an overview of relevant simulation methods.
Calcium ions play a vitally important role in signal transduction and are key to many cellular processes including muscle contraction and cell apoptosis (cell death). This importance has made calcium an active area in biomedical science and mathematical modelling.
By simulating a fundamental biological process occurring (such as a molecular binding event), and relating this to a process on a higher level we will gain further understanding into calcium-related diseases including type II diabetes, pulmonary arrhythmia, cancer and asthma.
The current study approaches multiscale in a 'top-down' approach; constructing biological network models based on differential rate equations for which detailed simulations will provide kinetic rate constants. 3D reconstruction of cellular architecture will provide geometry-related detail to these parameters.
Categories
Life sciences simulation: Systems biology
Algorithms and computational methods: Multi-scale
Visualisation and data handling software: Pylab
Programming languages and libraries: Python
Computational platforms: Linux