A Mathematical Model to Study the Dynamics of Epithelial Cellular Networks

作者：Abate Alessandro^*; Vincent Stephane; Dobbe Roel; Silletti Alberto; Master Neal; Axelrod Jeffrey D; Tomlin Claire J

来源：IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, 2012, 9(6): 1607-1620.

DOI：10.1109/TCBB.2012.126

• Epithelium
• cellular network
• nonlinear dynamical model
• spring-damper system
• discrete element method
• early dorsal closure
• morphogenesis

Epithelia are sheets of connected cells that are essential across the animal kingdom. Experimental observations suggest that the dynamical behavior of many single-layered epithelial tissues has strong analogies with that of specific mechanical systems, namely large networks consisting of point masses connected through spring-damper elements and undergoing the influence of active and dissipating forces. Based on this analogy, this work develops a modeling framework to enable the study of the mechanical properties and of the dynamic behavior of large epithelial cellular networks. The model is built first by creating a network topology that is extracted from the actual cellular geometry as obtained from experiments, then by associating a mechanical structure and dynamics to the network via spring-damper elements. This scalable approach enables running simulations of large network dynamics: the derived modeling framework in particular is predisposed to be tailored to study general dynamics (for example, morphogenesis) of various classes of single-layered epithelial cellular networks. In this contribution, we test the model on a case study of the dorsal epithelium of the Drosophila melanogaster embryo during early dorsal closure (and, less conspicuously, germband retraction).

• 出版日期2012-12