Igor Doktorski - Modeling growth of cell cultures

Abstract: Understanding and describing growth of cell colonies, like bacterial cultures, tumors, thrombi etc. is an important and challenging aim for modelers and mathematicians. Despite of many biological differences between specific cell colonies, they all have some important features in common, which will be used to derive a "first principle" model. With regard to quantitative predictions, it is of outmost importance to consider both mechanics and chemistry of the system. From a mathematical point of view, the model is a "multi-component" model: a coupled system of visco-elastic and transport equations with source terms. Additional reaction-diffusion equations describe the chemical part of the system. The strong coupling between both characterises the biochemical part of the system. In my talk, I will concentrate on a model system - a biofilm. Biofilms are three-dimensional submerged bacterial cultures. They are responsible for many infections in hospitals, huge energy losses in industry, but can be also used for "catalysing" bio-chemical processes in bio-reactors.