סמינר מחלקתי

מתן דודאי

תלמיד לתואר שני

המחלקה לפיזיקה באונ׳ ת״א

Modeling the migration behavior of cell colonies in two- and three- dimensions

Mechanotaxis is the directed migration of a cell due to forces it senses from the substrate, which are caused mainly by the presence of other cells or by external traction forces. The resulting cell movement plays important biological roles in, for example, wound healing, functions of the immune system, organogenesis or metastatic diseases. We present a model to simulate collective cell migration based on the forces that cells exert on elastic substrata. This work is focused on the influence of cell and substrate stiffness on the collective migration of cells. The simulations are initially developed to represent a two-dimensional (monolayer) problem, and then extended to represent migration in a three-dimensional extracellular matrix. The model is generic and can be utilized to study a variety of biological processes where migration is relevant, including tissue repair, cancer and infiltration of white blood cells to an infection site, to mention a few examples.