TY - JOUR A1 - Schütte, Christof A1 - Sarich, Marco T1 - A Critical Appraisal of Markov State Models JF - The European Physical Journal Special Topics N2 - Markov State Modelling as a concept for a coarse grained description of the essential kinetics of a molecular system in equilibrium has gained a lot of atten- tion recently. The last 10 years have seen an ever increasing publication activity on how to construct Markov State Models (MSMs) for very different molecular systems ranging from peptides to proteins, from RNA to DNA, and via molecu- lar sensors to molecular aggregation. Simultaneously the accompanying theory behind MSM building and approximation quality has been developed well be- yond the concepts and ideas used in practical applications. This article reviews the main theoretical results, provides links to crucial new developments, outlines the full power of MSM building today, and discusses the essential limitations still to overcome. Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2015-02421-0 VL - 224 IS - 12 SP - 2445 EP - 2462 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schütte, Christof A1 - Nielsen, Adam A1 - Weber, Marcus T1 - Markov State Models and Molecular Alchemy JF - Molecular Physics N2 - In recent years Markov State Models (MSMs) have attracted a consid- erable amount of attention with regard to modelling conformation changes and associated function of biomolecular systems. They have been used successfully, e.g., for peptides including time-resolved spectroscopic experiments, protein function and protein folding , DNA and RNA, and ligand-receptor interaction in drug design and more complicated multivalent scenarios. In this article a novel reweighting scheme is introduced that allows to construct an MSM for certain molecular system out of an MSM for a similar system. This permits studying how molecular properties on long timescales differ between similar molecular systems without performing full molecular dynamics simulations for each system under con- sideration. The performance of the reweighting scheme is illustrated for simple test cases including one where the main wells of the respective energy landscapes are located differently and an alchemical transformation of butane to pentane where the dimension of the state space is changed. KW - MSM KW - Reweighting KW - Girsanov Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/00268976.2014.944597 VL - 113 IS - 1 SP - 69 EP - 78 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kryven, Ivan A1 - Röblitz, Susanna A1 - Schütte, Christof T1 - Solution of the chemical master equation by radial basis functions approximation with interface tracking JF - BMC Systems Biology N2 - Background. The chemical master equation is the fundamental equation of stochastic chemical kinetics. This differential-difference equation describes temporal evolution of the probability density function for states of a chemical system. A state of the system, usually encoded as a vector, represents the number of entities or copy numbers of interacting species, which are changing according to a list of possible reactions. It is often the case, especially when the state vector is high-dimensional, that the number of possible states the system may occupy is too large to be handled computationally. One way to get around this problem is to consider only those states that are associated with probabilities that are greater than a certain threshold level. Results. We introduce an algorithm that significantly reduces computational resources and is especially powerful when dealing with multi-modal distributions. The algorithm is built according to two key principles. Firstly, when performing time integration, the algorithm keeps track of the subset of states with significant probabilities (essential support). Secondly, the probability distribution that solves the equation is parametrised with a small number of coefficients using collocation on Gaussian radial basis functions. The system of basis functions is chosen in such a way that the solution is approximated only on the essential support instead of the whole state space. Discussion. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, we consider four application examples: a) the self-regulating gene model, b) the 2-dimensional bistable toggle switch, c) a generalisation of the bistable switch to a 3-dimensional tristable problem, and d) a 3-dimensional cell differentiation model that, depending on parameter values, may operate in bistable or tristable modes. In all multidimensional examples the manifold containing the system states with significant probabilities undergoes drastic transformations over time. This fact makes the examples especially challenging for numerical methods. Conclusions. The proposed method is a new numerical approach permitting to approximately solve a wide range of problems that have been hard to tackle until now. A full representation of multi-dimensional distributions is recovered. The method is especially attractive when dealing with models that yield solutions of a complex structure, for instance, featuring multi-stability. Electronic version: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1752-0509/9/67 Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1186/s12918-015-0210-y VL - 9 IS - 67 SP - 1 EP - 12 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Enciso, Marta A1 - Schütte, Christof A1 - Delle Site, Luigi T1 - Influence of pH and sequence in peptide aggregation via molecular simulation JF - Journal of Chemical Physics Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4935707 VL - 143 IS - 24 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Duwal, Sulav A1 - Winkelmann, Stefanie A1 - Schütte, Christof A1 - von Kleist, Max T1 - Optimal Treatment Strategies in the Context of 'Treatment for Prevention' against HIV/1 in Resource-Poor Settings JF - PloS Computational Biology N2 - An estimated 2.7 million new HIV-1 infections occurred in 2010. `Treatment-for-prevention’ may strongly prevent HIV-1 transmission. The basic idea is that immediate treatment initiation rapidly decreases virus burden, which reduces the number of transmittable viruses and thereby the probability of infection. However, HIV inevitably develops drug resistance, which leads to virus rebound and nullifies the effect of `treatment-for-prevention’ for the time it remains unrecognized. While timely conducted treatment changes may avert periods of viral rebound, necessary treatment options and diagnostics may be lacking in resource-constrained settings. Within this work, we provide a mathematical platform for comparing different treatment paradigms that can be applied to many medical phenomena. We use this platform to optimize two distinct approaches for the treatment of HIV-1: (i) a diagnostic-guided treatment strategy, based on infrequent and patient-specific diagnostic schedules and (ii) a pro-active strategy that allows treatment adaptation prior to diagnostic ascertainment. Both strategies are compared to current clinical protocols (standard of care and the HPTN052 protocol) in terms of patient health, economic means and reduction in HIV-1 onward transmission exemplarily for South Africa. All therapeutic strategies are assessed using a coarse-grained stochastic model of within-host HIV dynamics and pseudo-codes for solving the respective optimal control problems are provided. Our mathematical model suggests that both optimal strategies (i)-(ii) perform better than the current clinical protocols and no treatment in terms of economic means, life prolongation and reduction of HIV-transmission. The optimal diagnostic-guided strategy suggests rare diagnostics and performs similar to the optimal pro-active strategy. Our results suggest that ‘treatment-for-prevention’ may be further improved using either of the two analyzed treatment paradigms. Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004200 VL - 11 IS - 4 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Djurdjevac Conrad, Natasa A1 - Banisch, Ralf A1 - Schütte, Christof T1 - Modularity of Directed Networks: Cycle Decomposition Approach JF - Journal of Computational Dynamics 2 (2015) pp. 1-24 N2 - The problem of decomposing networks into modules (or clusters) has gained much attention in recent years, as it can account for a coarsegrained description of complex systems, often revealing functional subunits of these systems. A variety of module detection algorithms have been proposed, mostly oriented towards finding hard partitionings of undirected networks. Despite the increasing number of fuzzy clustering methods for directed networks, many of these approaches tend to neglect important directional information. In this paper, we present a novel random walk based approach for finding fuzzy partitions of directed, weighted networks, where edge directions play a crucial role in defining how well nodes in a module are interconnected. We will show that cycle decomposition of a random walk process connects the notion of network modules and information transport in a network, leading to a new, symmetric measure of node communication. Finally, we will use this measure to introduce a communication graph, for which we will show that although being undirected it inherits all necessary information about modular structures from the original network. Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3934/jcd.2015.2.1 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Banisch, Ralf A1 - Djurdjevac Conrad, Natasa A1 - Schütte, Christof T1 - Reactive flows and unproductive cycles for random walks on complex networks JF - The European Physical Journal Special Topics, vol. 224, iss. 12 (2015) pp. 2369-2387 Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2015-02417-8 ER -