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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 24: Poster B: Active Biological Matter, Cell Mechanics, Systems Biology, Computational Biophysics, etc.

BP 24.46: Poster

Tuesday, March 23, 2021, 16:00–18:30, BPp

Analysis of cell contact inhibition during growth of epithelial tissue — •Sebastian Rühle, Anja Voß-Böhme, and Steffen Lange — University of applied sciences, Dresden, Germany

Dominating mechanisms in the development of healthy epithelial tissue are still subject to contemporary research, especially for tumour progression. While experiments suggest, that biomechanical cell-cell-interactions are crucial for the development of the tissue, it's usually oversimplified or neglected in theoretical approaches. For instance, the impact of cell migration, competition or contact inhibition on development of the cell colony is barely quantified. Puliafito et al. (2012) did experiments on MDCK-cells and proposed, that the behaviour of the colony during the growth phase can be solely explained by contact inhibition.

To test this hypothesis, we develop a cell-based model and compare the numerical results with the experimental data. using a cellular automaton we emulate single cell behaviour like cell migration, growth, proliferation, and cell-cell interactions like cell adhesion. The parameters are calibrated by experimental single cell tracking measurements. We show that without any mechanism of contact inhibition, this calibrated model reproduces emergent quantities like colony area, density, shape, cell size distribution, and collective cell motion from the experiment only to some extent. The discrepancies are most prominent for the long term cell density and cell size distribution and substantiate the role of contact inhibition in tissue growth.