Process Simulation of Complex Biological Pathways in Physical Reactive Space and Reformulated for Massively Parallel Computing Platforms.

Abstract

Biological systems encompass complexity that far surpasses many artificial systems. Modeling and simulation of large and complex biochemical pathways is a computationally intensive challenge. Traditional tools, such as ordinary differential equations, partial differential equations, stochastic master equations, and Gillespie type methods, are all limited either by their modeling fidelity or computational efficiency or both. In this work, we present a scalable computational framework based on modeling biochemical reactions in explicit 3D space, that is suitable for studying the behavior of large and complex biological pathways. The framework is designed to exploit parallelism and scalability offered by commodity massively parallel processors such as the graphics processing units (GPUs) and other parallel computing platforms. The reaction modeling in 3D space is aimed at enhancing the realism of the model compared to traditional modeling tools and framework. We introduce the Parallel Select algorithm that is key to breaking the sequential bottleneck limiting the performance of most other tools designed to study biochemical interactions. The algorithm is designed to be computationally tractable, handle hundreds of interacting chemical species and millions of independent agents by considering all-particle interactions within the system. We also present an implementation of the framework on the popular graphics processing units and apply it to the simulation study of JAK-STAT Signal Transduction Pathway. The computational framework will offer a deeper insight into various biological processes within the cell and help us observe key events as they unfold in space and time. This will advance the current state-of-the-art in simulation study of large scale biological systems and also enable the realistic simulation study of macro-biological cultures, where inter-cellular interactions are prevalent.