Open AccessSelf-organization in brain tumors: How cell morphology and cell density influence glioma pattern formation
Author(s) -
Sara Jamous,
Andrea Comba,
Pedro R. Löwenstein,
Sébastien Motsch
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
plos computational biology/plos computational biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.628
H-Index - 182
eISSN - 1553-7358
pISSN - 1553-734X
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007611
Subject(s) - flocking (texture) , flock , glioma , ellipsoid , pattern formation , biology , cell , spheroid , morphology (biology) , biophysics , biological system , neuroscience , chemistry , physics , cell culture , cancer research , ecology , genetics , quantum mechanics , astronomy
Modeling cancer cells is essential to better understand the dynamic nature of brain tumors and glioma cells, including their invasion of normal brain. Our goal is to study how the morphology of the glioma cell influences the formation of patterns of collective behavior such as flocks (cells moving in the same direction) or streams (cells moving in opposite direction) referred to as oncostream . We have observed experimentally that the presence of oncostreams correlates with tumor progression. We propose an original agent-based model that considers each cell as an ellipsoid. We show that stretching cells from round to ellipsoid increases stream formation. A systematic numerical investigation of the model was implemented inR 2. We deduce a phase diagram identifying key regimes for the dynamics (e.g. formation of flocks, streams, scattering). Moreover, we study the effect of cellular density and show that, in contrast to classical models of flocking, increasing cellular density reduces the formation of flocks. We observe similar patterns inR 3with the noticeable difference that stream formation is more ubiquitous compared to flock formation.