We discuss joint work with Mark Peletier, Giuseppe Savare,
Michiel Renger, and Matthias Liero concerning the derivation of
generalized gradient structures for reaction-diffusion systems.
The energy is the relative energy while the dual dissipation
 functional is the sum of a quadratic diffusion term
 (of Wasserstein type) and and an exponential term for the reactions.
 
 We show that this form arises from three different cases:
 
 (1) via the large-deviation principle for the Markov processes with
    Brownian motion as well as jumps;
 
 (2) for reaction arising as evolutionary Gamma limit from a Fokker-Planck equation
    with a high potential barrier
 
 (3) for transmission conditions arising as evolutionary Gamma limit
    for an entropic gradient flow with a thin layer with very low mobility.
 
 It is interesting that in the cases (2) and (3) we obtain a generalized
 gradient flow (i.e. the dissipation potential is non-quadratic) as an
 evolutionary Gamma limit form classical gradient flows
 (i.e. quadratic dissipation potential).