Calculation of yeast prion curing curves by numerical transform inversion

If the chemical guanidine hydrochloride is added to a dividing culture of yeast cells that carry a yeast prion, the proportion of cells that have the prion gradually decreases over time. Stochastic models to describe this process of ‘curing’ have been developed in earlier work. The present paper investigates the use of numerical Laplace inversion methods to calculate curing curves and contrasts this with current, more direct, approaches. Transform inversion is found to provide an efficient computational approach that allows different models to be investigated with a minimal amount of programming effort. Implementations are available in Matlab and R.