Modeling nonviral gene delivery as a macro-to-nano communication system

The principal role of any communication system is to deliver information from a source to a sink. Since gene delivery systems transport genetic information encoded as DNA to living cells, such systems can be considered as communication systems. Therefore, techniques developed for modeling conventional communication systems should be applicable to model gene delivery systems. The paper describes an approach to model nonviral gene delivery as a macro-to-nano communication system. To facilitate modeling, the gene delivery process is first described in terms of an abstractive layered communication protocol and then processing at each layer is implemented as M/M/∞∞ queues. To validate this approach, the model has been implemented in MATLAB/SIMULINK environment and the simulation results have been compared to experimental data from literature.