Multi-Cue Kinetic Model with Non-Local Sensing for Cell Migration on a Fiber Network with Chemotaxis

Cells perform directed motion in response to external stimuli that they detect by sensing the environment with their membrane protrusions. Precisely, several biochemical and biophysical cues give rise to tactic migration in the direction of their specific targets. Thus, this defines a multi-cue environment in which cells have to sort and combine different, and potentially competitive, stimuli. We propose a non-local kinetic model for cell migration in which cell polarization is influenced simultaneously by two external factors: contact guidance and chemotaxis. We propose two different sensing strategies, and we analyze the two resulting transport kinetic models by recovering the appropriate macroscopic limit in different regimes, in order to observe how the cell size, with respect to the variation of both external fields, influences the overall behavior. This analysis shows the importance of dealing with hyperbolic models, rather than drift-diffusion ones. Moreover, we numerically integrate the kinetic transport equations in a two-dimensional setting in order to investigate qualitatively various scenarios. Finally, we show how our setting is able to reproduce some experimental results concerning the influence of topographical and chemical cues in directing cell motility

Structure preserving schemes for Fokker–Planck equations with nonconstant diffusion matrices

In this work we consider an extension of a recently proposed structure preserving numerical scheme for nonlinear Fokker–Planck-type equations to the case of nonconstant full diffusion matrices. While in existing works the schemes are formulated in a one-dimensional setting, here we consider exclusively the two-dimensional case. We prove that the proposed schemes preserve fundamental structural properties like nonnegativity of the solution without restriction on the size of the mesh and entropy dissipation. Moreover, all the methods presented here are at least second order accurate in the transient regimes and arbitrarily high order for large times in the hypothesis in which the flux vanishes at the stationary state. Suitable numerical tests will confirm the theoretical results

Weak Amenability of Banach Algebras on Locally Compact Groups

AbstractRecent work by various authors has considered the implications of Banach algebra amenability for various algebras defined over locally compact groups, one of the basic tools being the fact that a continuous homomorphic image of an amenable algebra is again amenable. In the present paper we look at the consequences of weak amenability. Here the homomorphism property fails in general, however it remains true for suitable direct summands. It is this technique that we make much use of here