An Efficient Approach for the Hybrid Simulation of Intracellular Calcium Dynamics

Abstract

The dynamics of intracellular calcium plays a vital role in organising many processes of the cell. However, creating and simulating an in-silico model to understand this phenomenon is not a straightforward task. One reason for such complexity is the requirement to employ deterministic and stochastic processes in one model. Therefore, hybrid simulation is of paramount importance in this context. Although many hybrid models have been proposed to study the dynamics of intracellular calcium, the speed of the underlying simulation algorithms is still slow as many of such algorithms do not take advantage of the structure properties of the intracellular calcium models. In this paper, we propose an efficient hybrid simulation that takes advantage of the model structure to boost the simulation performance. Our solution is based on the idea of coloured hybrid Petri nets to detect similar structures. We also compare the result of our simulation to the one produced by standard hybrid simulation.