PRIMER SERIES
Friday, 6 June 2014
4.10pm
Erskine 031

Rachelle Binny (School of Mathematics & Statistics, UC)

Title:  Defining Moments: Spatial Structure in a Model of Collective Cell Movement

Abstract: The ability of cells to migrate plays a fundamental role in tissue repair, development and the immune response. Pathologies such as cancer can arise when the regulatory mechanisms controlling this movement are disrupted. Interactions occurring at the level of individual cells may lead to the development of spatial structure which will affect the dynamics of migrating cells at a population level. Models that try to predict population-level behaviour often take a mean-field approach, which assumes that individuals interact with one another in proportion to their average density and ignores the presence of any small-scale spatial structure. In this primer, we will describe an individual-based model (IBM) that uses random walk theory to model the stochastic interactions occurring at the scale of individual migrating cells. We will then discuss an alternative to the mean-field approach which employs spatial moment theory in order to account for spatial structure and predict how these individual-level interactions propagate to the scale of the whole population.
ALL WELCOME
Primers URL: http://www.math.canterbury.ac.nz/primer.shtml