Analyzing photoactivation with diffusion models to study transport in the Endoplasmic Reticulum network

Photoactivation is a paradigm consisting in local molecular fluorescent activation by laser illumination in a chosen region (source) while measuring the concentration at a target region. Data-driven modeling is concern with the following questions: how from the measurement in these two regions, is it possible to infer the properties of molecular propagation? How is it possible to use such reponses to infer motions occurring in networks such as the endoplasmic reticulum? In this article, we present a data-driven analysis based on diffusion-transport models and numerical simulations to interpret the photoactivation dynamics and extract biophysical parameters. Finally we discuss modeling approaches to reconstruct local network properties from photoactivation transients.