Dresden 2017 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 29: Posters - Multi-Cellular Systems

BP 29.2: Poster

Tuesday, March 21, 2017, 14:00–16:00, P2-EG

Predicting cell colony growth from single cell proliferation and migration behavior — •Nico Wunderling, Julian Übelacker, Janina Lange, Ben Fabry, and Claus Metzner — Biophysics, University of Erlangen, Germany

The macroscopic growth of cell colonies on planar substrates is driven by the division and migration of individual cells. Experiments show that many qualitative features of the colony growth dynamics, such as a linear growth of the colony radius with time, are universal among many diff erent cell types, thus pointing to a generic mechanism behind this collective phenomenon. Here, we describe colony growth by a celldensity-dependent proliferation and diffusion. Using cells seeded at different confluencies (30-100%), we measure how the proliferation rate and the diffusion constant vary with cell density for three differently metastatic tumor cell lines (HT1080 fibrosarcoma, MDA-MB-231 epithelial breast carcinoma, and MCF-7 epithelial breast carcinoma). We find that cell proliferation saturates at high cell densities in HT1080 and MDA-MB231 cells, but shows a maximum at intermediate cell densities for MCF-7 cells. Cell diffusion is independent of cell density in MDA-MB-231 and MCF-7 cells, but linearly increases with cell density in HT1080 cells. With these experimentally obtained density-dependent proliferation and diffusion profiles, we numerically predict the cell colony growth over several days. In each case, we find a linear growth of the colony radius versus time with a growth speed that closely matches the experimental data, thus demonstrating that colony growth can be predicted from single cell behavior.