

Preprint 96/2004
Coarse graining in simulated cell populations
Dirk Drasdo
Contact the author: Please use for correspondence this email.
Submission date: 23. Dec. 2004
published in: Advances in complex systems, 8 (2005) 2/3, p. 319-363
DOI number (of the published article): 10.1142/S0219525905000440
Bibtex
Abstract:
The main mechanisms that control the organization of multicellular tissues
are still largely open.
A commonly used tool to study basic control mechanisms are in-vitro experiments
in which the growth conditions can be widely varied.
However, even in-vitro experiments are not free from unknown or uncontrolled
influences.
One reason why mathematical models become more and more a popular
complementary tool to experiments is that they permit to study hypotheses
that were derived from biological experiments,
free from unknown or uncontrolled influences.
Many model types have been considered so far to model multicellular
organization ranging from detailed individual-cell based models with
explicit representations of the cell shape to cellular automata models with no
representation of cell shape, and continuum models, that consider
a local density averaged over many individual cells.
However, how the different model description may be linked, and, how
a description on a coarser level may be constructed based on the
knowledge of the finer, microscopic level, is still largely unknown.
Here we consider the example of monolayer growth in-vitro to illustrate
how in a multi-step process starting from an single-cell based off-lattice-model
that subsumes the information on the sub-cellular scale by characteristic
cell-biophysical and cell-kinetic properties a cellular automaton may be
constructed whose rules have been chosen based on the findings in
the off-lattice model.
Finally we use the cellular automaton model as a starting point
to construct a continuum model by a systematic coarse-graining procedure.
The development of our models is guided by experimental observations
on growing monolayers.