[biorxiv.org] To reduce health risks for human space exploration, it is important to model the effects of deep-space radiation on biological systems.
The budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a common model organism in space radiobiology, but little is known about how radiation damage to individual cells translates into the population-level effects that experiments measure.
The Agent-Based Model for Microbial Populations Exposed to Radiation (AMMPER) is a spatially explicit agent-based model that simulates the effects of ionizing radiation on S. cerevisiae cells and produces population-level results. Its goal is to improve experiment design and data interpretation.
AMMPER-1 demonstrated that agent-based simulations can qualitatively reproduce the effects of proton radiation on the growth rate of wild-type and DNA-repair mutant yeast. Here, we present AMMPER-2, which addresses limitations of the first model and expands its capabilities.
AMMPER-2 incorporates the dynamics of the redox dye alamarBlue, a data type commonly generated in spaceflight microbiology experiments, and models the fate of reactive oxygen species in more detail.
It also adds an improved graphical interface and runs faster. AMMPER-2 remains easy to execute in Python on a standard personal laptop, providing space biologists a tool to explore experimental conditions, generate hypotheses, and interpret data from microbial space radiation experiments.
IMPORTANCE
Understanding how deep-space radiation affects living systems is essential for safe long-duration human space exploration. However, the link between radiation damage at the level of the individual cell and the population-level growth and metabolic signals measured in spaceflight experiments remains poorly understood. Computational tools that connect these scales can improve experiment design and data interpretation. This manuscript describes an update to AMMPER, a previously published computational modeling tool. The intended users are scientists, educators, and students interested in the biological effects of radiation on organisms, and the tool prioritizes ease of use and accessibility over complexity and precision. This model is a work in progress, and the manuscript focuses on new features and lessons learned rather than scientific findings.
AMMPER-2: A spatially explicit agent-based model of microbial radiobiology with redox dye simulation, biorxiv.org
Astrobiology,
