Definition
STEPS (Hepburn et al. 2012) is a molecular simulator designed to simulate neuronal signaling pathways in dendrites and around synapses but can also be applied to other biochemical networks. STEPS simulates such systems to a high level of detail by supporting complex morphology, stochastic kinetics, spatial concentration gradients, and diffusion. For reasons of efficiency STEPS employs the subvolume discretization approach based on Gillespie’s stochastic simulation algorithm (Gillespie 1977), rather than particle-tracking methods.
Since version 2.0 STEPS also supports accurate computation of local membrane potentials Hepburn et al. (2013). Tight integration with the reaction-diffusion calculations allows detailed, accurate, and relatively efficient coupling between the molecular and the electrical components of cell signaling.
Binaries and source code are released under the GNU General Public License (version 3) and are available at http://steps.sourceforge.net.
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References
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Hepburn, I. (2013). STEPS: STochastic Engine for Pathway Simulation. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_262-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_262-7
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STEPS: STochastic Engine for Pathway Simulation- Published:
- 11 January 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_262-8
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STEPS: STochastic Engine for Pathway Simulation- Published:
- 01 March 2014
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_262-7