A Darcy’s law model of tumor growth

This talk presents how mathematical analysis is useful in ana-lyzing the cell fate. In many developing biological tissues, analternating salt-and-pepper pattern of cells is formed from aninitially uniform cell type. Two proteins, Delta and Notch,playsa critical role in generating this structure by switching neighborcells into opposite cell fates. A very simple model from Sprinzaket al, Nature 2010, was developed to study this mechanism. Wewill present steady state and sensitivity analysis of this model toinvestigate under what conditions the cell can develop a switchof cell fate. This is a joint work with Matt Moore (a CMU un-dergraduate student) and Yican Zhang (a high school student).