Healing and harm: modelling the relation between cell motion and environmental topography

This exciting proposal will revolutionize our understanding of cellular motion and its profound implications for health. The project merges cutting-edge mathematics with groundbreaking biology to ignite new research areas and support discipline health.
In collaboration with experimentalists at the University of Reading we seek to build on their new cellular movement data by constructing a sophisticated mechanical model to decode the intricate motion of cells during muscle healing and cancer metastasis. Namely, to perform their healing and harming functions cells must move to target locations. The exhibited movement is known as blebbing, whereby cells produce rounded membrane blisters that allows cells to move through their extensions and retractions.
Currently, most work on cell motion ignores environmental complexity as experiments extract cells and place them on flat plates, or gels, which do not match the complicated heterogeneous environments that cells naturally contend with.