Investigating Motility and Pattern Formation in Pluripotent Stem Cells Through Agent-Based Modeling

Understanding and predicting the pattern formation in groups of pluripotent stem cells has the potential to improve efficiency and efficacy of stem cell therapies. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms of pluripotent stem cell behaviors are highly complex and are currently still not fully understood. A key practical question is whether deep biological modelling of the cells is essential to predict their pattern formation, or whether there is sufficient predictive power in simply modelling their behaviors and interactions at a higher level. This study focuses on the social interactions and behaviors of pluripotent stem cells at a high-level to predict aggregate crowd behaviors within a level of uncertainty. Agent-based modelling was applied to study the pattern formation in pluripotent stem cells. Five models were established to test four biologically plausible rules of cell motility in terms of: a) velocity, b) directional persistence time, c) directional movements, and d) border effect. We found that it is possible that cells' directional movements based on local density play an important role of the pattern formation, and pattern formation in pluripotent stem cells is governed by a complex combination of rules in our agent-based model simulations, which account for much of the variability observed in experimental findings.