Een computationeel platform voor individuele cel-gebaseerde modellen van zelforganizatie bij gist over mechanica van rode bloedcellen tot een generisch celmodel

摘要

The functioning of a biological tissue in many cases crucially depends on the mechanics at the cellular scale. This is shown in several example systems. Firstly, for a system of two phenotypes of yeast cells, which are adhesive and non-adhesive respectively, sorting occurs yielding a structure, in which the more adhesive cells are on the inside whereas the non-adhesive cells are on the outside. The Young’s modulus of the two strains was measured in atomic force microscopy experiments showing no difference between the strains. Compared to the results of an individual cell-based model it is found that the difference in adhesion in combination with Brownian motion and the locality of growth of new cells suffices to explain the emergence of this shell-like structure.In a second case, it is shown that the dynamics of initial cell spreading can be understood as a result of adhesion and dissipative forces at work on the interface of the developing contact plane. Especially for red blood cells, the model perfectly captures the experimental observations of two distinct experiments from the literature. A new deformable cell model with mechanistic contact interactions has been introduced to capture the developing adhesive contact. This model can be generalized to other cell types and applications in the field of individual cell-based models. To simulate these and a wide variety of similar models, a C++ software platform with a python interface has been developed and its usefulness proven by above mentioned examples. It has been more widely applied together with colleagues to develop models for microcarrier cell expansion and a new formulation of the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method for low Reynolds numbers called NSPH.