README

LImmSim - Readme
===================

  An agent based simulation of the vertebrate adaptive immune response.

  Version 0.1 - 2007-11-11
  --------------------------
  http://www.tcs.uni-luebeck.de/forschung/software/limmsim/

    Copyright (C) 2007 Johannes Textor <textor@tcs.uni-luebeck.de>

    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
    Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA

  Requirements:
    g++ to compile the source.
    wish (tcl/tk) to use the GUI.

  Summary:
    LImmSim is an extended and modified implementation of the Celada-Seiden
    model as described in 
    Currently it includes the following processes:
      - B and T cells, Macrophages, Antigen, and Antibody
      - Unspecific phagocytosis of Antigen by Macrophages
      - Specific phagocytosis of Antigen by B-cells
      - Antigen presentation and costimulation
      - Development of Plasma B cells, secretion of antibody
      - Formation of immune coplexes of antibody and antigen
      - Formation of immune memory through memory B cells
      - Somatic hypermutation of the B cell receptor


      - delete, edit and add fields
      - execute any SQL-statement, even batch-queries
      - manage keys on fields
      - load text files into tables
      - create and read dumps of tables
      - export and import CSV data
      - administer one single database
      - communicate in more than 38 different languages

  Download:
    You can get the newest version at the URL
    http://www.tcs.uni-luebeck.de/forschung/software/limmsim/

  Compilation:
    Hopefully, you will only need to type "make" in the source directory to 
    compile LImmSim. The provided Makefile has worked for me on several Linux
    distributions. An alternative Makefile is provided for Solaris which uses
    the Sun C++ compiler. If you encounter problems with the makefiles, please
    let me know about it. 

  Installation:
    limmsim-gui.tcl and the limmsim binary have no additional dependencies and
    can be copied to an arbitrary directory. LImmSim writes its output to a
    subdirectory named "output" which is expected to contain two additional
    subdirectories "data" (for cell counts) and "dumps" (for BMP images of
    cell and molecule concentrations). Sample GNU-Plot scripts to summarize the
    simulation output are provided in the "output"-directory of the source
    tarball.

  Usage:
    You may use LImmSim directly from the command line or via the GUI. If
    limmsim is called with no arguments, it will run with the compiled-in
    standard parameters, which is basically useless since these parameters do
    not define antigen injections. When LImmSim is called with the argument -i:

    ./limmsim -i

    it will read parameter definitions from standard input. E.g., you may type

    dump_bmps 1

    to tell LImmSim to generate BMP dumps of cell and molecule concentrations.
    When CTRL-D or a line containing only a dot (".") is encountered, the 
    simulation is started. Parameters which have not been given on standard
    input will have the default values.

    It is convenient to store the parameters in a text file and pass them to
    LImmSim via 

    ./limmsim -i < settings/default-settings.txt

    Execute this command in the source directory to see limmsim get ill and
    (hopefully) cure itself twice. 

  Parameters:

    In an upcoming release of LImmSim, there will be a file PARAMETERS which
    explains what all these parameters actually mean. 

  Credits:

    LImmSim is an implementation of a conceptual model originally developed by
    Franco Celada and Philip Seiden [1].

    The development of LImmSim would not have been possible without the
    open-source version of C-ImmSim, v6, developed by Filippo Castiglione [2,3],
    which includes several extensions to the original CS model. For example,
    contains simulations of cancer and an HIV infection. [4].

    The following pieces of Free software have been developed by other people
    and are used in LImmSim:

    - BMP_IO is a collection of C functions to read and write images in BMP
      format written by John Burkhardt:
      http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~burkardt/cpp_src/bmp_io/bmp_io.html

    - combobox is a "completely, totally, free" widget for tk written by Bryan
      Douglas Oakley. Without it the GUI would be much less usable:
      http://www1.clearlight.com/~oakley/tcl/combobox/index.html

    - The mersenne twister is a fast pseudo random number generator written by
      Richard J. Wagner:
      http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wagnerr/MersenneTwister.html

    Thanks to you guys for your excellent work.

  Bibliography:

    [1] P. E. Seiden and F. Celada
        A Model for Simulating Cognate Recognition and Response in the Immune
        System
        Journal of Theoretical Biology 158:329-357, 1992

    [2] M. Bernaschi and F. Castiglione
        Design and Implementation of an Immune System Simulator
        Computers  in Biology and Medicine, 31(5) 303-331, 2001

    [3] F. Castiglione, M. Bernaschi and S. Succi
        Simulating the Immune Response on a Distributed Parallel Computer
        Int J Mod Phys C 8(3), 527-545, 1997

    [4] F.Castiglione, F. Poccia, G. D'Offizi and M. Bernaschi
        Mutation, fitness, viral diversity and predictive markers of disease
        progression in a computational model of HIV-1 infection
        AIDS Research and Human Retrovirus, 20(12), 1316-1325, 2004