DE Seminar: Prof. Brad Peercy (UMBC)

Third of Our UMBC Faculty DE Series

Location

Mathematics/Psychology : 401

Date & Time

November 8, 2021, 11:00 am12:00 pm

Description

Title: Mathematically Modeling Clustered Cell Migration in the Drosophila Egg Chamber

Abstract: The egg chamber of Drosophila is a biological model system for development, cancer metastasis, and wound healing and specifically allows for the study of cell signaling, designation of cell fate, and motion.  How we represent this system in a mathematical framework depends in part on the questions we ask and biophysical characteristics.  In this seminar, I will focus on how we use force balance equations implemented in an agent based model.  We use independent math cells to represent biological cells of vastly differing sizes to capture cluster migration and rotation while featuring only basic forces.  After walking through the development of the model and its early results, I will discuss our latest work extending the agent based model to include the cell boundaries, imaging the egg chamber and importing the data for model geometry, and how receptor dynamics may be able to optimize the sensing of chemical gradients.