Abstract
Organisms always grow and develop in a precise way: the critical events in embryo development always happen at the same time points among different individuals, and most individuals of the same species are grown into similar size. It is believed that the development of organism is under precise and complex controlling, but the underlying mechanism is still not known, especially for the formation of cyst, which is a hollow spherical structure made of one layer of epithelial cells. However, some diseases such as polycystic kidney disease are related to the production of cyst. The knowledge of cyst formation will not only help us deal with these diseases, but may enable us to manipulate and engineer the epithelial tissue into certain shape and size in synthetic biology.
We are approaching this topic by investigating the process of cyst formation from both experimental and theoretical aspects. We embedded Caco-2 cell, which is an epithelial-like cell line, in jelly-like Matrigel to grow into cyst for further measurements and experiments. The talk will give a brief introduction of our previous experimental findings, and focus on the theoretical approach from continuum model and discrete model. Some methods and problems in extract information from experimental data will be mentioned as well.