Mathematical Biology Seminar

Speaker: Jared Barber (Indiana University, Indianapolis)

Title: Viscoelastic computational models of bone cells and migrating cells

Abstract: Cellular forces, whether due to external or internal sources, have been implicated in a number of important biological processes.  Here we focus on two such processes:  Bone regulation by osteocytes, bone cells that respond to external forces in useful ways, and cell migration, which plays a role in cancer metastasis, wound healing, and other areas.  Our models in both cases use a network of interconnected damped springs, or viscoelastic elements, to model the cell.

 With osteocytes, the external and internal fluid is coupled to our viscoelastic meshwork using a lattice-Boltzmann immersed boundary method.  The external fluid surrounds the cell which, in turn, is surrounded by rigid bone material. Leveraging our approach’s relatively strong ability to handle complex geometries, we constructed four osteocyte models of varying complexity to consider what forces osteocytes tend to experience when in their natural environment.  We will share our approaches and findings that include suggestions that high force may arise where arms or processes of osteocytes connect to the main portion of the cell and that osteocytes may experience higher forces when inlets preferentially outnumber outlets in the region.