Section: New Results

Tropical Algebra Methods for Model Reduction

Participants : François Fages, Jonas Sénizergues, Sylvain Soliman.

Jonas Sénizergues has just started a PhD Thesis on the design of model reduction techniques for systems biology based on tropical algebra. The idea is to reason on the orders of magnitude of both kinetic parameters and molecular concentrations in order to determine particular regimes exhibiting fast-slow decomposition and amenable to model reductions. Such model reductions generalize the quasi steady-state (QSSA) and quasi-equilibrium (QE) criteria, and lead to hybrid automata for chaining the reduced dynamics. The solving of tropical equilibration equations rely on previous work using constraint programming techniques (Sylvain Soliman, François Fages, Ovidiu Radulescu. A constraint solving approach to model reduction by tropical equilibration. Algorithms for Molecular Biology, 9(24), 2014.) with collaboration with Ovidier Radulescu (Univ. Montpellier) and Andreas Weber (University of Bonn, Germany).