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H. Hatzikirou, A. Chauviere, M. Tektonidis, "Identifying the mechanisms of glioma invasion." Short abstract: Cancer invasion has been recognized a highly complex phenomenon which involves processes in various spatiotemporal scales. Glioblastoma multiforme comprises an extremely interesting paradigm of invasive tumor, where its dynamics and mechanisms are not yet fully understood. Mathematical modeling provides invaluable tools in the analysis of complex phenomena. In order to gain insight in the mechanisms glioblastoma invasion, we study an existing in vitro cell culture of glioma cells. In particular, we develop a cellular automaton model that allows for testing in silico hypotheses of cellular mechanisms against these experimental data. We are interested in revealing the generic mechanisms that can explain the experimentally observed invasive behavior of the glioma cell culture. Our analysis shows that the migration/proliferation dichotomy assumption is playing an essential role in the expansion of glioma cells. Moreover, we find that a cell-cell repulsion is required to explain the observed radial persistence of glioma cells near to highly dense areas. The combination of these two mechanisms are the sufficient and necessary conditions for the faithful reproduction of the experimental observed behavior. |