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Ali Heydari wins a Best Poster Award at SIAM CSE21

March 12, 2021

Ali Heydari wins a Best Poster Award at SIAM CSE21. Congratulations!

Please check out Ali's award-winning poster.

Title: Modeling Multi-Scale Dynamics of Protein Aggregation in Dividing Yeast Cells with 3D Level-Set Method

Abstract. Advances in microscopy allow cell biologists to visualize intracellular dynamics with increasing ability to resolve the localization, mobility, and interactions between proteins in living cells. For mathematical and computational convenience, protein concentrations are often assumed to be constant within a cell(ordinary differential equations) or to vary spatially in a homogeneous compartment (partial differential equations). In either case, the evolving dynamics of the cell boundary itself, or the complexity of the cellular environment, including the presence of obstacles, are not usually considered. In this work, we use a 3D level-set method to model the cell wall, nucleus, and other cellular compartments in a dividing yeast cell. We use this method to study the intracellular process of protein aggregation. We find that yeast's asymmetric cell division dynamics result in significant differences in concentration upon the separation between mother and daughter cells. As expected, this difference increases further as cellular obstacles are included. This work demonstrates that the level-set method will be a powerful tool in offering meaningful quantitative information for analysis and interpretation of the increasingly sophisticated microscopy data in cell biology.