Cellular Open Resource (COR): A public CellML based environment for modeling biological function

Computer models have proved to be invaluable to experimental and theoretical research in cardiac electrophysiology, and several environments have been designed to aim at easing the development of such models. Recent advances in computing have made the development of graphical user interfaces much simpler, which has lead to the arrival of new software packages that are used primarily for teaching, not research. Here, we introduce Cellular Open Resource (COR), a modeling environment that runs under Microsoft Windows® and that can be used for both research and teaching. It is built around CellML™, which provides COR with "out of the box" access to an increasing database of single cell models. Though COR was initially developed to handle cardiac modeling, it may also be applied to other types of reaction (and diffusion) problems. The interface is designed with user friendliness in mind (e.g. an equation viewer can be used to graphically visualize an equation as it would appear in a publication). All the cell models used in a single cell or a multicellular problem are checked for correctness, before being dynamically compiled and converted into machine code, in order to maximize computing efficiency. The computation of a problem is both interactive and event-driven. One can, thus, modify the properties of a problem at any point in time and/or subject to a particular condition