Section: New Results

Modeling activated/inhibited cell-sheet wound dynamics

Participants : Abderrahmane Habbal, Hélène Barelli [Univ. Nice Sophia Antipolis, CNRS, IPMC] , Grégoire Malandain [Inria, EPI Morpheme] , Boutheina Yahyaoui [PhD, LAMSIN, Univ. Tunis Al Manar] , Mekki Ayadi [LAMSIN, Univ. Tunis Al Manar] .

In a previous paper [91], we have shown that the well-known Fisher-KPP equations are able to model the natural wound closure of cell-sheets. This family of equations, with constant coefficients, exhibit progressive fronts with constant speed and we have proved by confronting to experiments that F-KPP is remarkabely able to predict the dynamics of experimental wounds. However, this is no more the case when the cell-sheet is either inhibited or activated exogeneously. In this case, we used a F-KKP equation with time-dependent coefficients, and proved again that with this modification we were able to capture the wound dynamics [13]. To take into account further biological features in the mathematical model, we implemented a coupling between the mechanical behavior of the cell tissue and the evolution of the density, using classical linear visco-elastic models from the literature. Our present effort is on assessing the ability of the mechano-biological coupled system to render some of the cell-sheet dynamics that are missing from the Fisher-KPP equation alone.