Section: New Results

Microtubules modeling for variational assimilation analysis

Participants : Pierre Allain, Charles Kervrann.

In this project, we propose a bio-physical modeling of growing microtubules at the scale of a single cell. The theoretical advantage of such a modeling is to step aside empirically-based heuristics often carrying artificial parameters which can be hard to tune and to make sense in a data analysis context. We thus propose to model microtubules as rigid and growing cylinders alike (Nedelec and Foethk 2007) [34] but including Newtonian dynamics.

Using both this modeling and fluorescence microscopy, we aim at controlling simulated microtubules to satisfy in vitro observations. We plan to use variational assimilation with adjoint method in the future to achieve such an estimation. We believe that this approach should be able to provide information both on microtubules properties and on vesicle transport dynamics.

Figure 11. Simulation of growing microtubules in 3D.