Coherence would like to be a distributed multiscale framework for ontogenesis simulation and generation of optimized biofabrication protocols.

• Overview
  • Methodological information
• Coherence container
  • Setup
  • Usage
    • Exploring the container
    • Shutting down the container
    • Running an experiment
• Coherence from source
  • Setup
  • Usage
    • Running an experiment
    • Batch mode
• Author
• Publications
• Recommended citation for this project
• Copyright

Biofabrication processes are complex and often unsatisfactory. Trial-and-error methods are costly and yield only incremental innovation, starting from sub-optimal and poorly represented existing processes. Although computational techniques might support efficient process design to find optimal process configurations, intelligent computational approaches must comprise biological complexity to provide meaningful insights. Coherence is a novel prototypal co-simulation-based optimization methodology for the systematic design of protocols for cell culture and biofabrication. The proposed strategy integrates evolutionary computation and simulation for efficient design space exploration and assessment of candidate protocols. A generic library supports the modular and flexible composition of multiscale and multidomain co-simulation scenarios. The feasibility of the presented approach was demonstrated in the automatic generation of protocols for the biofabrication of an epithelial cell monolayer (see Publications).

Coherence includes a Design Space Exploration (DSE) engine for the generation of biofabrication protocols and a simulation engine for testing them. The framework receives the high-level specification of the target product and iteratively computes a biofabrication protocol optimized to grow it. The DSE assembles potential biofabrication protocols and feeds them to simulation instances. Simulation results are compared against the specifications of the target product used to rank the corresponding protocols and generate new ones at the next iteration. This procedure continues until an optimal protocol is produced, a predetermined number of iterations is reached, or the protocol performance stalls for a given number of iterations.

Additional details and experimental results on a selected use-case can be found in our publications.

The following instructions help you build a Singularity container for running coherence.

1. If Singularity is not installed in your system, open a shell and run

   wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smilies-polito/coherence/master/singularity_install.sh && \
   sudo chmod +x singularity_install.sh && \
   sudo ./singularity_install.sh

2. Then get the container definition and build it.

   This step is going to take a few minutes to complete.

   wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smilies-polito/coherence/master/coherence_container.def && \
   singularity build --fakeroot coherence_container.sif coherence_container.def

   You will obtain a Singularity container (coherence_container.sif) with all the libraries and the code to run experiments with Coherence.

3. Create a workspace folder for the experiments. This folder will be bound to the experiments folder in the container, so that results will be written locally.

   mkdir ~/workspace

   You can download the provided examples and unzip them into your workspace folder. Alternatively, you can set up your own experiments based on the README.

singularity instance start --bind ~/workspace/:/packages/coherence/experiments coherence_container.sif coherence

A container instance named coherence is now running in background.

You can open a shell into the container with

singularity shell instance://coherence

A few predefined environment variables are available to the user:

• $COHERENCE points to coherence install directory packages/coherence
• $EXPERIMENTS expands to packages/coherence/experiments, where your local ~/workspace directory is mounted.

You can manually run your experiments from inside the container following the same instructions provided for the container-less version.

To stop the instance use

singularity instance stop coherence

You can automagically run an experiment without dealing with coherence code

singularity run instance://coherence half

This command executes the singularity script in the coherence_container.sif image root, which is a dump of the code defined in the %runscript section of the coherence_container.def file.

Substitute half in the command above with any other ${experiment name} in your ~/workspace.

Instructions on how to define new experiments are available in the experiments/README file.

The results will be collected locally, in the ~/workspace/${experiment name}/results folder.

If you are running the same experiment again, rename the results folder first.

The following sections guide you through the installation of coherence and all its dependencies directly on your system (i.e. the execution is not confined into a container).

1. Install system dependencies

   If your system is Ubuntu >= 20.04 LTS, run:

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rock-core/qt4 && \
   sudo apt-get update && \
   sudo apt-get -y install build-essential apt-utils cmake wget bzip2 git curl binutils qt4-default unzip python3-venv python3-virtualenv screen

   Otherwise, run:

   sudo apt-get -y install build-essential apt-utils cmake wget bzip2 git curl binutils qt4-default unzip python3-venv python3-virtualenv screen

2. Install python 3.9.5

   wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.9.5/Python-3.9.5.tgz && \
   tar -xf Python-3.9.5.tgz && \
   cd Python-3.9.5 && \
   ./configure --enable-optimizations && \
   make -j 8 && \
   make altinstall && \
   cd .. && \
   rm -rf Python*

3. Get coherence

   git clone https://github.com/smilies-polito/coherence.git && \
   virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3.9 coherence/venv && \
   source coherence/venv/bin/activate && \
   python -m pip install -r coherence/requirements.txt

4. Install custom libraries

   N.B. First check the virtualenv created above is active.

   CoSimo

   git clone https://github.com/leonardogian/CoSimo.git && \
   python -m pip install -e CoSimo

   PyBoolNet

   git clone -b 2.31.0 --depth 1 https://github.com/hklarner/pyboolnet.git && \
   python -m pip install -e PyBoolNet

   microgp3

   git clone https://github.com/squillero/microgp3.git && \
   cd microgp3/src && \
   sed -i '34 a #include <functional>' ./Libs/EvolutionaryCore/Evaluator.h && \
   sed -i '40 a #include <functional>' ./Libs/EvolutionaryCore/CandidateSelection.h && \
   cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=DEBUG -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=$HOME . && \
   make && make install && \
   mv $HOME/bin/ugp3 /opt && \
   mv $HOME/bin/ugp3-extractor /opt && \
   cd .. && \
   rm -rf microgp3

   N.B. Make sure /opt is in your $PATH!

From inside the coherence folder, run

./coherence.sh experiments/half

Substitute half in the command above with any other ${experiment name} in your coherence/experiments folder.

The results will be stored in the coherence/experiments/${experiment name}/results folder.

If you are running the same experiment again, rename the results folder first.

From inside the coherence/experiments folder, run

./run_batch.sh

Edit the experiment variable in ./run_batch.sh with the list of experiments (i.e. folder names in coherence/experiments) to be run.

Each experiment will be run in a dedicated detached screen named after ${experiment name}.

Each ${experiment name} results will be collected in their corresponding coherence/experiments/${experiment name}/results folder.

Leonardo Giannantoni

Politecnico di Torino - Control and Computer Engineering Department
PhD Candidate @ SMILIES group

E: leonardo.giannantoni@polito.it
P: +39 011 090 7191
M: +39 377 283 4499
A: Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24 10129 Torino Italy
W: https://www.smilies.polito.it

1. Leonardo Giannantoni, Roberta Bardini, and Stefano Di Carlo. "A methodology for co-simulation-based optimization of biofabrication protocols". IWBBIO 2022.

The experiment presented in this paper is available in the half folder, together with the results.

APA

  Giannantoni, L. (2022). Coherence (Version 1.0.0) [Computer software]. https://github.com/smilies-polito/coherence

BibTeX

  @software{Giannantoni_Coherence_2022,
  author = {Giannantoni, Leonardo},
  month = {4},
  title = {{coherence}},
  url = {https://github.com/smilies-polito/coherence},
  version = {1.0.0},
  year = {2022}
  }

Coherence is licensed under the MIT license. A copy of this license is included in the file LICENSE.