Welcome to the Virtual Mouse Website
The Virtual Mouse website has been formed to relay information about the Virtual Mouse Project as it progresses over time. Information on research issues, related research, and the research approach may be found here, as well as an extensive literature review.
Research Issues. How do you simulate an entire creature on the metabolic scale? Being able to predict how certain classes of mice react will be a novel and groundbreaking new method for drug discovery. The calculations made in virtual cells and virtual mice can be transferred to synthetic biologists who are working to build a cell and eventually a mouse "from the ground up."
Related Research. The Virtual Cell project at the University of Connecticut Medical Center is producing a database of known reactions at the cellular level. We can use the database instead of computing similar reactions. In the long term, we would like all calculations at the grid nodes to be database lookups.
Research Approach. A very large grid will be laid over the physical domain of a mouse. At each grid node is a chemical reaction that can be simulated using a program like Gaussian or NWChem unless the reaction is already known and in a database. Between nodes is a simple heat and mass transfer problem that is solved between time steps. A multiscale (or multigrid) approach will significantly speed up the calculations.