TY - JOUR A1 - Winkelmann, Stefanie A1 - Schütte, Christof T1 - The Spatiotemporal Master Equation: Approximation of Reaction-Diffusion Dynamics via Markov State Modeling JF - Journal of Chemical Physics N2 - Accurate modeling and numerical simulation of reaction kinetics is a topic of steady interest.We consider the spatiotemporal chemical master equation (ST-CME) as a model for stochastic reaction-diffusion systems that exhibit properties of metastability. The space of motion is decomposed into metastable compartments and diffusive motion is approximated by jumps between these compartments. Treating these jumps as first-order reactions, simulation of the resulting stochastic system is possible by the Gillespie method. We present the theory of Markov state models (MSM) as a theoretical foundation of this intuitive approach. By means of Markov state modeling, both the number and shape of compartments and the transition rates between them can be determined. We consider the ST-CME for two reaction-diffusion systems and compare it to more detailed models. Moreover, a rigorous formal justification of the ST-CME by Galerkin projection methods is presented. Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4971163 VL - 145 IS - 21 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 - Gupta, Pooja A1 - Gramatke, Annika A1 - Einspanier, Ralf A1 - Schütte, Christof A1 - von Kleist, Max A1 - Sharbati, Jutta T1 - In silico cytotoxicity assessment on cultured rat intestinal cells deduced from cellular impedance measurements JF - Toxicology in Vitro N2 - Early and reliable identification of chemical toxicity is of utmost importance. At the same time, reduction of animal testing is paramount. Therefore, methods that improve the interpretability and usability of in vitro assays are essential. xCELLigence’s real-time cell analyzer (RTCA) provides a novel, fast and cost effective in vitro method to probe compound toxicity. We developed a simple mathematical framework for the qualitative and quantitative assessment of toxicity for RTCA measurements. Compound toxicity, in terms of its 50% inhibitory concentration IC50 on cell growth, and parameters related to cell turnover were estimated on cultured IEC-6 cells exposed to 10 chemicals at varying concentrations. Our method estimated IC50 values of 113.05, 7.16, 28.69 and 725.15 μM for the apparently toxic compounds 2-acetylamino-fluorene, aflatoxin B1, benzo-[a]-pyrene and chloramphenicol in the tested cell line, in agreement with literature knowledge. IC50 values of all apparent in vivo non-toxic compounds were estimated to be non-toxic by our method. Corresponding estimates from RTCA’s in-built model gave false positive (toxicity) predictions in 5/10 cases. Taken together, our proposed method reduces false positive predictions and reliably identifies chemical toxicity based on impedance measurements. The source code for the developed method including instructions is available at https://git.zib.de/bzfgupta/toxfit/tree/master. KW - Real-time cell analyzer KW - Toxicity KW - Mathematical modeling Y1 - 2017 SN - 1438-0064 VL - 41 SP - 179 EP - 188 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 - CHAP A1 - Gupta, Pooja A1 - Krause, Carola A1 - Rikeit, Paul A1 - Röblitz, Susanna A1 - Knaus, Petra A1 - Schütte, Christof T1 - Modeling of the BMP mediated co-regulation of the Smad and Non-Smad pathways in the context of cell density T2 - 10th International BMP conference, 2014, Berlin, Germany Y1 - 2014 ER -