Seminar 21st April 2010 1 p.m. 54/7C
SYMBIOSIS seminar - Computational-experimental approaches to tissue engineering and amino acid transport in the placenta
Bram Sengers
School of Engineering Sciences
- Categories
- Biomedical
- Submitter
- Thomas Blumensath
An overview will be presented of how computational modelling approaches can be combined with experiments to characterize biological behaviour. The first part of the talk will focus on regenerative medicine/tissue engineering. Models were developed to quantify how cells colonize complex trabecular bone structures, based on cell migration and proliferation. While these models assumed uniform cell behaviour, bone marrow stromal cells actually form a heterogeneous population containing stem/progenitor cells, as demonstrated by colony forming assays. Therefore modelling was combined with a novel two stage colony forming experiment to determine whether the observed heterogeneity in cell colony formation could be explain by a simple hierarchical population model. The second part will focus on amino acid transport in the placenta. Amino acid transport from mother to fetus is a highly complex process governed by a number of distinct interacting transport mechanisms, which can only transfer specific amino acids. As it is very difficult to gain an intuitive insight in this process, ex-vivo perfused placenta experiments were modelled using a simple compartmental model to understand how these different transporter mechanisms can work together as an integrated system