Chemotaxis

Check out the video tutorials below or take a self-paced look at our other, text-based ‘Getting Started’ course materials. Model construction interface After downloading and opening Morpheus, you’ll see the model construction interface:

Hepatocyte–sinusoid alignment (HSA) supports the coordination of hepatocytes during liver regeneration after damage by carbon tetrachloride. Introduction The regenerative capacity of the mammalian liver did already inspire the fate of Prometheus in Greek Myth but it still poses many questions today that call for spatio-temporal multicellular modeling.

Membrane pattern allows anisotropic release of substance into a chemical synapse Introduction Special cell types, like neurons or immune cells, communicate through a chemical synapse. This includes the anisotropic secretion of a substance into the gap between two cells.

Introduction The mass-conserving secretion and uptake of (signaling) molecules by cells can in Morpheus be achieved with Mappers and scaling fluxes by cell.volume. The intracellular amount of signal may trigger a change in a state variable that could downstream change cell behaviors.

Hybrid continuum-chemical and agent-based cell model Introduction The idea that the diffusion of extracellular signaling molecules sets up non-local cellular communications can also be used to simulate non-local forces using chemoattraction and repulsion.

Diffusion model with cells endowed with chemotactic ability Introduction Previously developed diffusion models can be used to model chemotaxis by adding cells endowed with chemotactic ability. Here, chemotaxis of a group of cells towards a chemical diffusing into the domain with a high level at the right boundary is demonstrated, as well as in a second model, Keller-Segel cells being the sources of their own attractant.

This multiscale mechanistic liver lobule model is composed of various interacting cell types, such as hepatocytes, residential Kupffer cells and macrophages. It captures hepatocellular acetaminophen (APAP) metabolism, DNA damage response activation, necrotic cell death, macrophage recruitment and the regulation of hepatocellular senescence and proliferation, with qualitatively different outcomes as a function of the initial APAP concentration in blood plasma.

Introduction Comparison of spatio-temporal model output to experimental measurements or between model variants all require the application of summary statistics. For multicellular models, statistical properties of the cell configuration at given times or across time are of interest and Morpheus provides some Analysis/Trackers for that: CellTracker, DisplacementTracker, ClusteringTracker and ContactLogger.

Introduction Larvae of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans aggregate into clusters of several hundred moving individuals when starved during their first larval stage (see video below). Avery et al. proposed that starved larvae produce and respond chemotactically to two diffusible chemical signals, a short-range attractant and a longer range repellent.

Membrane pattern allows anisotropic release of substance from cell Introduction This example serves to demonstrate a multiscale model of a cell secreting a substance/molecule and propelling away from the secreted substance.