Modeling mesoscale patterns in the development of the intestinal nervous system.
by
Anthony Fernando
University of Melbourne
Coauthors: Kerry Landman, Don Newgreen, Emily Hackett-Jones

Colonisation of the gut by neural crest cells is an important phase of embryonic development, and disruption of this process leads to congenital defects of the intestinal nervous system. Previous work has shown that models incorporating random walks with exclusion and agent proliferation on a regular lattice can successfully reproduce many of the experimentally observed phenomena of the colonisation process, at both microscale and macroscale levels. We extend this work to consider differentiation of cells into neurons and the development of a neural network, and investigate how the network and the crest cells mutually interact to produce the observed mesoscale features. We determine ways to quantify the evolving mesoscale network structures, and thereby elucidate the key parameters in this interaction.

Date received: January 7, 2010