Team:KU Leuven/Project/Oscillator/Modelling

In this part of the wiki we will describe how we performed an analysis of our proposed oscillating system and the results. This text starts with a small introduction on what we want to achieve with this oscillator, a topic that is more thoroughly elaborated on the design page. Before we started the analysis that is stated here, we looked up how similar networks have been analyzed before in order to see what direction we will take. A full-scale analysis would go beyond the scope of the project so we will stick to an elaborate indicative study. The first step is to translate our network into ODE’s (ordinary differential equations), which we will make more realistic step by step. We will use these to see how easily sustained oscillations form. This is of course not the most impressive feature since there are many known networks that easily produce oscillations. We chose not to include the effect on amplitude and frequency, since that would make the scope of this study explode and the many assumptions we have to make, render it unrealistic. The important feature of our network is its synchronization features. In order to check whether our model achieves rapid resynchronization, we will solve systems of PDE’s (partial differential equations). Since those are a lot more computationally intense, we used the Flemish Super Computer Centre (VSC) in order to do our computations time-efficiently. The explanation of how the network functions and how it attains synchronized oscillations can be found on the page explaining the design. For the transformation into a biological network, we refer you to the wetlab page.