Gene expression for simulation of biological tissue

BioDynaMo is a biological processes simulator developed by an international community of researchers and software engineers working closely with neuroscientists. The authors have taken part in the development of the physical engine, and they are currently working on gene expression, i.e. the process by which the heritable information in a gene the sequence of DNA base pairs is made into a functional gene product, such as protein or RNA. Typically, gene regulatory models employ either statistical or analytical approaches, being the former already well understood and broadly used. In this paper, we utilize analytical approaches representing the regulatory networks by means of differential equations, such as Euler and Runge-Kutta methods. The two solutions are implemented in the BioDynaMo project and are compared for accuracy and performance.