My first couple of days at May Project have been fruitful!
I am working in the Clinical Research Science Building at the Wash U Medical School. (I get my own desk!) I am programming in Java to model cancerous cell growth and proliferation. So far, I have been able to simulate a single cell's progression through the cell cycle (given certain time parameters, such as time in each phase of the cycle), though there are many more nuances to cell growth that I hope to add later to my model, such as cell size, which increases at an exponential rate, according to some articles I have read.
As of now, my program outputs which phase of the cell cycle that the cell is currently in, given a time point and a start time.
Soon, I will be trying to increase the number of cells in this simulation and hopefully adding a visual representation of this model instead of having just numerical outputs. I am thinking of implementing a Monte Carlo simulation that will give the number of cells in each cell cycle phase (G1, S, G2, or M) at a given time point. I would represent this as a bar graph, though I still have to figure out how to do that in Java...
It would also be interesting if I could visually represent the spatial development of a mass of cancerous cells. It would be a cool Java applet!
Olivia - this sounds great! Can you get your data into a csv file? You could then use Excel to do some graphing and visual representations - of course, it would be even better if you could get an applet to update in real time as new data values are calculated... I'm looking forward to hearing more about the project and you get further along!
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