Applications in modern biotechnology and molecular medicine often require simulation of biomolecular systems in atomic representation with immense length and timescales that are far beyond the capacity of computer power currently available. As a consequence, there is an increasing need for reduced models that describe the relevant dynamical properties while at the same time being less complex. In this book the authors exploit the existence of metastable sets for constructing such a reduced molecular dynamics model, the so-called Markov State Model (MSM), with good approximation properties on the long timescales. With its many examples and illustrations, this book is addressed to graduate students, mathematicians, and practical computational scientists wanting an overview of the mathematical background for the ever increasing research activity on how to construct MSMs for very different molecular systems ranging from peptides to proteins, from RNA to DNA, and via molecular sensors to molecular aggregation. This book bridges the gap between mathematical research on molecular dynamics and its practical use for realistic molecular systems by providing readers with tools for performing in-depth analysis of simulation and data-analysis methods.

The aim of this book is to provide a well-structured and coherent overview of existing mathematical modeling approaches for biochemical reaction systems, investigating relations between both the conventional models and several types of deterministic-stochastic hybrid model recombinations. Another main objective is to illustrate and compare diverse numerical simulation schemes and their computational effort. Unlike related works, this book presents a broad scope in its applications, from offering a detailed introduction to hybrid approaches for the case of multiple population scales to discussing the setting of time-scale separation resulting from widely varying firing rates of reaction channels. Additionally, it also addresses modeling approaches for non well-mixed reaction-diffusion dynamics, including deterministic and stochastic PDEs and spatiotemporal master equations. Finally, by translating and incorporating complex theory to a level accessible to non-mathematicians, this book effectively bridges the gap between mathematical research in computational biology and its practical use in biological, biochemical, and biomedical systems.