Dirk Drasdo, Max Plank Institute, Leipzig

will give a talk on

Individual-cell based modeling of multicellular assemblies - a step towards computational tissues

Monday, January 31, 10AM

Conference room, INRIA Rhône-Alpes, Montbonnot (Grenoble), France

Abstract

Recent spectacular progress in molecular biology, biochemistry, biophysics, biotechnology, and medicine has led to a flood of quantitative and qualitative information in the life sciences that spans multiple scales from the molecular to the organism level. New disciplines such as systems biology are emerging in response to the challenge of understanding the functional relationships underlying these data. A suitable modeling framework linking the molecular information with the dynamical processes in the organism must be able to involve the dynamical cross-linkings between many components on each functional level from genome, proteome, to cells, tissues and organisms. While modeling frameworks on the sub-cellular level to model genetic or metabolic regulation are partly established, model frameworks to simulate multi-cellular systems ranging from tumors to regenerative tissues, developmental systems and bacteria cell populations that permit to include the information on the sub-cellular level are currently under investigation. Here we present a class of models in which each cell is parameterized by a few experimentally accessible cell-biological, cell-biophysical and cell-kinetic parameters. We show by computer simulations on growing mono-layer and multicellular spheroids, on crypt fission and early development how this model class may be used to analyze pattern formation in multicellular systems. We outline how information on the sub-cellular level may be integrated in this model class. Finally we sketch how this model class may serve as a starting point to construct simplified models for multicellular systems with significantly reduced computational demand.