CME2011

Workshop on the Numerical Solution of the Chemical Master Equation in Molecular Biology

TUM Institute for Advanced Study 12. September 2011

10:00 AM - 18:00 PM Konferenzraum 1. OG

Organisors: Markus Hegland, TUM-IAS and ANU and Per Lötstedt, Uppsala University

Description

Chemical reactions in living organisms exhibit stochastic behavior and are described by continuous time discrete state Markov models. The governing equation for the temporal evolution of the probability distribution of such systems is the chemical master equation. Traditional numerical techniques for the solution of the chemical systems frequently fail because of the curse of dimensionality which affects high-dimensional problems (with dimension larger than 5). One cause of the high dimensionality are the large numbers of different kinds of molecules involved. Often stochastic simulation is the only tool which is feasible to computationally explore such systems. In this workshop we will discuss alternatives based on novel numerical techniques which have the potential to overcome the curse.