Interfaces in Multicellular Tissues

James Osborne | University of Melbourne�jmosborne@unimelb.edu.au

Chaste Workshop

January 9^th 2025

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Interfaces??

Void Closure

Tissue Growth

Tissue Collision

Off Lattice Models

Vertex

(Dynamics)

Model

Overlapping

Spheres

Voronoi

Tessellation

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OS repulsion

OS short-range

OS long-range

VT unbounded

VT bounded

VT ghosts

VM smooth

VM default

VM curved

Representing Interfaces

Comparing (sub-)models

Void Closure

Tissue Growth

Tissue Collision

Vedula et al. Nat Commun 2015 Murphy et al. Commun Biol 2022 Heinrich et al. Nat Commun 2022

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Void closure

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Results – void closure

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Tissue growth

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Results – tissue growth

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• Start with two strips of cells and assign labels A and B

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• Allow the tissue to grow in a confined space.

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• Cells obey a Bernoulli trial cell cycle with Contact Inhibition

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• Note: adhesion parameters chosen to prevent mixing

B

A

Periodic in y-axis

Solid boundary in x-axis

Tissue collision

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Results – tissue collision

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Take home: choice of cell boundary descriptions in individual-based models can significantly influence behaviour at a tissue scale!

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Overlapping Spheres: time scale of tissue dynamics is highly sensitive to the description of the interface

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Voronoi Tessellation: structure and shape of the tissue depends on the description of the interface

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Vertex Model: least sensitive model, but time scales still can depend on the description of the interface

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doi:10.1007/s11538-023-01214-8

https://github.com/jmosborne/TissueBoundaries

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Summary

Acknowledgements

Jennifer Flegg

Domenic Germano

Adrianna Zanca

Stuart Johnston

Currently have a 15 month position available to work on things like this. Advert goes live next week but if interested send me an email!