Today we start to scramble. Running simulations of the models that have been developed, debugging code, extending the models a bit and trying to understand the results. Not everyone has used exactly the same set of parameters and the tedium of tracking all that down while bleary-eyed and desperately attempting to extend our models is quite a challenge.
So what were the results? Really two main items.
- First of all the trajectories of the cells become very tangled as the number of magnetic beads is confounded by the starting position of a given cell. What is clear is that if the distance that the particles travel is significantly increased then cells with varying amounts of attached magnetite eventually segregate into their separate cohorts.
- For the concentration model it is also clear that for a given fixed cohort of cells (i.e. all with the same number of attached beads) that the nonlinearity of the magnet only slightly modifies the contration profile as it evolves in time and extends into the scaffold.
The scaffold needs to be modelled quite carefully and much of the future work will be in dealing with this particular problem. Can we estimate this properly with using a porosity? A naive approach doing this do not really give satisfactory results and if it tends to zero, while we do stop the cells, this makes the equations unstable.
Working into the evening we collected all the various material and thrashed out a consistent notation to cobble together the presentation for the morning.
Please go to the MBI workshop page for all presentations.