Modelling, Simulation and Visualisation of Stem Cell Behaviour

We are part of a multi-disciplinary team investigating new understandings of stem cell behaviour. The project is a collaboration between an artist (Jane Prophet), a mathematician (Mark d’Inverno), a stem cell researcher (Neil Theise), an Artificial life (Alife) programmer (Rob Saunders), and a curator/producer (Peter Ride). Theise has novel ideas about how adult stem cells behave and organise themselves in the human body, in order to investigate methods and mechanisms for investigating and interpreting these new ideas. These have included a formal mathematical model, simulations, visualisations that have been developed with the stem cell researcher as well as a series of art pieces that have resulted from looking at the overall nature of our combined multi-disciplinary attempt to investigate new theories of biological organisation. In this paper we look at several issues relating to our project. First, we provide reasons for why formal models and simulations are needed to explore this massively growing area of research. Next, an introduction on current theoretical models of stem cells is presented along with an outline of some of the problems and limitations of these approaches. We then provide an overview of our agent-based model of stem cells, and discuss strategies for implementing this model as a simulation and its subsequent visualisation. Then we discuss the role of the artist in developing our model and simulation and the influence of the artwork/exhibition on the other members in our team. Our premise is that artists can conceptualise scientific theories without the standard discipline-specific constraints, and thereby potentially influence the development of scientific theories, their mathematical formulation; and their associated aesthetics. Finally, we argue that for the field of bioinformatics to move forward in a holistic and cohesive manner more multi-disciplinary efforts such as ours would be of significant benefit to this research area [18]. Indeed, this paper can be seen in part as an advert for the benefits of multi-disciplinary teams in bioinformatics