Método de phase-field para simular a motilidade de células rastejantes baseada na dinâmica da rede de actina

Abstract

In the last decade, the field of soft matter has used active fluid modeling to describe biological tissues and cells in order to describe the mechanical and dynamical properties of these living systems. In particular, the two-dimensional effective geometry of the Hele-Shaw cell has been shown to be useful for describing the shape and propagation of fragments of the lamellipodium of crawling cells, which are capable of locomotion on a solid substrate through actin network polymerization and adhesion at focal points. We use a simplified active fluid model in two dimensions with modified boundary conditions at the interface to describe a cell fragment droplet. To perform completely nonlinear simulations of the hydrodynamic flow and the fragment interface, we use a method to smooth the fluid interface by introducing an artificial scalar field called the phase-field. Our goal is to use mathematical and computational methods of fluid dynamics to describe free boundary problems with these biological systems.