Computational package of a mechanical cell-based model to study tissues in developmental and regenerating conditions

BORGES, AUGUSTO; CECCARELLI, ALBERTO; CHARA OSVALDO; CURA COSTA, EMANUEL; ALVAREZ HUGO ARIEL

Conferencia; Latin American Society for Developmental Biology (LASDB) meeting 2019; 2019

Quantitative and in particular modelling approaches have gained momentum to study structural and dynamical features of tissues in development and regeneration. A number of cell-based models were developed to investigate tissue-scale properties that emerge from cell-scale parameters. One of the popular cell-based models studied to understand mechanical aspects of tissues is the vertex model. In this model, cells are represented as polygons and tissue dynamics are governed by forces acting on the vertices of those polygons. In this study, we aim to present an open source computational package encoded in Python to implement this modelling class devoted to simulate developmental and regenerating tissues named SysVert. The package allows the user to define different cell types within a tissue and different rules of cell proliferation, apoptosis or topological rearrangements to simulate a wide spectrum of tissues in different conditions. Here, we present simulations performed with a pre-release version of SysVert, as a proof of concept of the package capabilities.