UTA MAE Research Team Wins JCND Best Paper Award
The paper, entitled “Minimizing Computational Time for Long-Term Three-Dimensional Dynamic Simulation of Stem Cell Adipogenesis,” was one of only two winners selected for the prestigious award. A grant from the National Institutes of Health supported this work.
Computer simulation of cellular-level biological processes is of great interest because it is often difficult to measure or observe the characteristics of structures and processes at such a small length scale.
Physics-based simulations can be used to fill in unmeasurable or unobservable details. The simulation of cell biodynamics typically relies on multiscale models whose solution requires substantial computational time to obtain even short time histories (picoseconds to microseconds) of system evolution. The multiscale nature of these systems stems from the disproportionality between the very small masses and large forces in the model and the differently sized masses of objects included in the model. Solving this model to simulate the two-week-long biological process of stem cell differentiation, adipogenesis in particular (adipogenesis involves a stem cell changing into a fat cell), would require months or years of computational time, making the simulation infeasible.
We developed a scaling approach that drastically reduces the computational time down to a little more than one hour,” said Dr. Alan Bowling. “The simulation results closely matched experimental data for the two-week-long process of adipogenesis.”
This simulation was implemented as interpreted code within the MATLAB software environment on a typical desktop computer, so we expect the computational time can be reduced much further by implementing it in a compiled language. This research is currently aimed at exploring the dynamics of a cell’s cytoskeleton, which has a tremendous impact on a stem cell’s ability to differentiate into a desired cell type.
The full paper is available in the ASME Digital Collection.
