Date of Award

5-2015

Document Type

Thesis campus only

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Mark Lewis

Second Advisor

Hoa Nguyen

Abstract

Chemotaxis, a big word in biology, but broken down into its Greek roots it actually has a quite simple meaning. Chemo, derived from kemo meaning chemicals, and taxis is derived from taksis meaning movement. Putting these together, you get chemotaxis, which according to Oxford English Dictionary is “the movement of a motile cell or organism, or part of one, in a direction corresponding to a gradient of increasing or decreasing concentration of a particular substance.” The study of chemotaxis offers vast implications, among them is the dissemination of cancer tumors by chemotaxis of tumor cells.

As far back as the late 19th century, there has already been intensive studies in cell chemotaxis. This project seeks to be part of a bigger project that studies cell chemotaxis in a fluid environment, which di↵erentiates it from previous experiments. After studying the movements of Escherichia coli cells in the lab environment and creating a mathematical model that represents that movement, this project seeks to run simulations for the the multi-scale model that couples the internal signaling pathway with the external cell motility to demonstrate Escherichia coli ’s chemotactic behavior in the fluid environment. To do so requires translating and re-programming the original code from MatLab to a different programming language that will enhance the program with the ability to model up to 1000 cells given our model parameters.

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