In silico simulation of cell proliferation and movement

The movies were analyzed with MotoCell, a web application previously developed in the hosting laboratory. MotoCell is able to track and evaluate the paths followed by cultured cells moving on a surface. Tracking procedure consists in clicking cells at the various positions occupied in subsequent frames: x- y coordinates are recorded on click, written into a table and stored in a text file.
Origin and destiny of each cell are also registered. The path of each cell consists of displacements (steps) that the cell has made between two consecutive frames and is characterized by origin (start, newborn, found, gone in) and destiny (split, dead, lost, gone out); start is the origin of cells at the first observation time, newborn indicates the origin of cells born from mitotic events occurred during the period of analysis, found identifies cells followed after the first time, finally with gone in are marked cells entering the field of observation during the period of analysis. The fates of split and dead indicate respectively divided or dead cells during observation; lost are cells lost during the tracking procedure; finally gone are cells that in the course of the observations have left the region of interest. Text files containing the results of cell tracking are evaluated by MotoCell which calculates statistical parameters for each cell path, or for the whole population. All the experimental parameters used in this work to simulate proliferation and migration are obtained from tracking of cultures of MDA-MB-231 from human breast adenocarcinoma and NIHFynK- obtained by stably expressing a constitutively inactive form of the kinase Fyn in NIH3T3 fibroblast. Cells are kept in DMEM (Dulbecco's Modified Eagle's Medium) containing 10% FBS with penicillin (10U / ml), streptomycin (10U / ml) and 2 mM L-glutamine.