The high pace of new findings in the field and an ever increasing amount of data from new high throughput techniques make it challenging to isolate core principles of the process.
In order to analyze such mechanisms, we developed an abstract mechanistic model of a subset of the known regulatory processes during cell differentiation and production of induced pluripotent stem cells.
The model incorporates recent findings in epigenetics and partially reproduces experimentally observed reprogramming efficiencies and changes in methylation and chromatin remodeling.
It also explicitly includes the transduction of factors using viral vectors and their silencing in reprogrammed cells, since this is still a standard procedure in somatic cell reprogramming.