Are there tools to visually model/simulate the spread of a mutant cell population in 2D?

Question

[Rubal]

Hello Everyone,

I want to model growth in a colony of cells on a 2D surface. I want to see how a mutant cell appears that appears at time X has a growth rate X times greater than other cells in the culture, how it will spread over a 2D surface competing with the original cells. Are there any tools available to do such simulations? I have worked with simulation software like ms, but am not aware of anything for doing these kind of simple spatial simulations. My goal is to see what the spatial distribution is of the 2 cell populations after time X. Thank you in advance for your suggestions.

Answer 1

[Jean-Karim Heriche]

There are a number of specialized software out there that I think can do what you want. Here are two:
- Chaste (example applications in this paper)
- CellSys

Note that most specialized software require more parameters than what you mention.
For simple parameters and rules, you could probably use cellular automata (e.g. Conway's game of life, implementations on rosettacode.org). A list of CA software is available here. There are also javascript CA frameworks e.g. here and here.

[Rubal]

thanks I'll take a look!