Chaste: an open source C++ library for computational physiology and biology

Chaste - Cancer, Heart And Soft Tissue Environment - is an open source C++ library for the computational simulation of mathematical models developed for physiology and biology. Code development has been driven by two initial applications: cardiac electrophysiology and cancer development. A large number of cardiac electrophysiology studies have been enabled and performed, including high performance computational investigations of defibrillation on realistic human cardiac geometries. New models for the initiation and growth of tumours have been developed. In particular, cell-based simulations have provided novel insight into the role of stem cells in the colorectal crypt. Chaste is constantly evolving and is now being applied to a far wider range of problems. The code provides modules for handling common scientific computing components, such as meshes and solvers for ordinary and partial differential equations (ODEs/PDEs). Re-use of these components avoids the need for researchers to "re-invent the wheel" with each new project, accelerating the rate of progress in new applications. Chaste is developed using industrially-derived techniques, in particular test-driven development, to ensure code quality, re-use and reliability. In this article we provide examples that illustrate the types of problems Chaste can be used to solve, which can be run on a desktop computer. We highlight some scientific studies that have used or are using Chaste, and the insights they have provided. The source code, both for specific releases and the development version, is available to download under an open source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) licence at http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/chaste, together with details of a mailing list and links to documentation and tutorials

Growth Based Morphogenesis of Vertebrate Limb Bud

Many genes and their regulatory relationships are involved in developmental phenomena. However, by chemical information alone, we cannot fully understand changing organ morphologies through tissue growth because deformation and growth of the organ are essentially mechanical processes. Here, we develop a mathematical model to describe the change of organ morphologies through cell proliferation. Our basic idea is that the proper specification of localized volume source (e.g., cell proliferation) is able to guide organ morphogenesis, and that the specification is given by chemical gradients. We call this idea “growth-based morphogenesis.” We find that this morphogenetic mechanism works if the tissue is elastic for small deformation and plastic for large deformation. To illustrate our concept, we study the development of vertebrate limb buds, in which a limb bud protrudes from a flat lateral plate and extends distally in a self-organized manner. We show how the proportion of limb bud shape depends on different parameters and also show the conditions needed for normal morphogenesis, which can explain abnormal morphology of some mutants. We believe that the ideas shown in the present paper are useful for the morphogenesis of other organs

A separable shadow Hamiltonian hybrid Monte Carlo method

Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) is a rigorous sampling method that uses molecular dynamics (MD) as a global Monte Carlo move. The acceptance rate of HMC decays exponentially with system size. The shadow hybrid Monte Carlo (SHMC) was previously introduced to reduce this performance degradation by sampling instead from the shadow Hamiltonian defined for MD when using a symplectic integrator. SHMC’s performance is limited by the need to generate momenta for the MD step from a nonseparable shadow Hamiltonian. We introduce the separable shadow Hamiltonian hybrid Monte Carlo (S2HMC) method based on a formulation of the leapfrog∕Verlet integrator that corresponds to a separable shadow Hamiltonian, which allows efficient generation of momenta. S2HMC gives the acceptance rate of a fourth order integrator at the cost of a second-order integrator. Through numerical experiments we show that S2HMC consistently gives a speedup greater than two over HMC for systems with more than 4000 atoms for the same variance. By comparison, SHMC gave a maximum speedup of only 1.6 over HMC. S2HMC has the additional advantage of not requiring any user parameters beyond those of HMC. S2HMC is available in the program PROTOMOL 2.1. A Python version, adequate for didactic purposes, is also in MDL (http:∕∕mdlab.sourceforge.net∕s2hmc)

CompuCell, a multimodel framework for simulation of morphogenesis

Motivation: COMPUCELL is a multi-model software framework for simulation of the development of multicellular organisms known as morphogenesis. It models the interaction of the gene regulatory network with generic cellular mechanisms such as cell adhesion, division, haptotaxis, and chemotaxis. A combination of a state automaton with stochastic local rules and a set of differential equations, including subcellular ordinary differential equations and extracellular reaction-diffusion partial differential equations, model gene regulation. This automaton in turn controls the differentiation of the cells, and cellcell and cell-extracellular matrix interactions that give rise to cell rearrangements and pattern formation, e.g. mesenchymal condensation. The cellular Potts model, a stochastic model that accurately reproduces cell movement and rearrangement, models cell dynamics. All these models couple in a controllable way, resulting in a powerful and flexible computational environment for morphogenesis, which allows for simultaneous incorporation of growth and spatial patterning. Results: We use COMPUCELL to simulate the formation of the skeletal architecture in the avian limb bud. Availability: Binaries and source code for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Solaris are available fo

3D cell pattern generation in artificial development

Cell pattern formation has an important role in both artificial and natural development. This paper presents an artificial development model for 3D cell pattern generation based on the cellular automata paradigm. Cell replication is controlled by a genome consisting of an artificial regulatory network and a series of structural genes. The genome was evolved by a genetic algorithm in order to generate 3D cell patterns through the selective activation and inhibition of genes.Morphogenetic gradients were used to provide cells with positional information that constrained cellular replication in space. The model was applied to the problem of growing a solid French flag pattern in a 3D virtual space. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg