Role of self-propulsion in cell segregation of 2D circularly confined co-culture

Author: Alberto Serrano (RIT undergraduate)

Adviser: Dr. Moumita Das (Assistant Professor of Physics at RIT)

Abstract

Cell segregation is a key process during tissue morphogenesis in embryonic development and tumor formation. That is why a deeper understanding into the role of self-propulsion and contact interactions is needed, while using a simple model. A computational approach was taken to study the problem more closely by applying our model to a 2D co-culture with circular confinement. Core-shell structures were not observed and it was shown that cancer cells move faster than healthy cells as seen in experiments.

Running the simulation

1. Run make to generate executable file.
   • Remove the compilation flag -DCMD_OUT from makefile if you want the data to be outputted to a file (1.out).
2. defaults.cpp can be modified to change simulation parameters.
3. Run ./coculture to start simulation.
4. Run ./run.sh N from within the plots directory to animate the output, where N is the number of frames.
5. (Optional) Use make clean and make cleanjunk to remove .o files and excess images.