Evaluation of colony formation dataset of simulated cell cultures

Abstract

In vitro biological experiments and in silico individual-based computational models are widely used to understand the low-level behavior of cells and cellular functions. Many of these functions can not be directly observed, however, may be deduced from other properties that can be well measured and modeled. In this paper, we present a procedure to evaluate synthetic cell colony formation generated by an off-lattice individual-based model. The calculated shape features of the artificial cell aggregates can be related to the parameter values of the simulated agents, therefore this data can be used to quantify properties of real-life cells such as motility or binding affinity that can not be easily determined otherwise. Our experiments showed that only a few of these parameters are responsible for the difference in shape features of the colonies.