Cell fusion

[Chalchisa Degu Bekana]

Dear developers, 

I’m working on modeling lumen fusion in Morpheus. When two cells/lumens merge, I’d like them to behave as a single entity with a unified volume, radius, and ID. At the moment, they appear to fuse visually (sometimes with artifact boundaries), but the simulation still treats them as separate cells with distinct IDs and volumes.

Is there a way to implement true cell fusion in Morpheus so that merged lumens are recognized as one consolidated object with combined properties?

Thanks!

Chalchisa

[Lutz Brusch]

Dear Chalchisa,

thank you for this relevant feature request! So far, Morpheus does not provide such cell-fusion functionality yet and we have added it to our ToDo list. Note, as cells (and lumens) may contain further properties for metabolites or signaling molecules, we will also develop an interface to specify how multiple such properties (representing concentrations or amounts) shall be passed on to the single fused object.

For now, you may use a workaround with manually defined Variables that represent the properties of each lumen, that is made up of lumen 'sub-cells'. I attach a demo model which provides the lumen volume time courses (you can similarly do this for metabolites etc.) from sums of 'sub-volumes'. The Analysis/ClusteringTracker identifies each lumen and numbers them and stores that lumen.ID in a Property of each 'sub-cell'. Therewith, a CellType/Mapper can filter the relationship of each 'sub-cell' to its lumen and process its data. The movie shows how the lumen 'sub-cells' form growing clusters = lumens. Also, the target volume of each 'sub-cell' is set to increase with time to get something more interesting to measure. The Logger/Plot then shows a colored line per lumen.ID and you can see at which time points (upon lumen fusion) one such line drops to zero and another jumps up by that same amount. This should provide the data that you were asking for. 

Just the Gnuplotter still shows the outlines of the 'sub-cells' when plotting Cells but you may write cell.type into a Global/Field and then plot that Field, this would display each lumen as a uniform area without the interior outlines of the 'sub-cells' (but would also hide the outlines of the surrounding actual cells). So keep having fun with Morpheus!

Best regards,
Lutz
(for Morpheus.lab)

[Lutz Brusch]

...and here comes the time course plot of lumen volumes.

[Chalchisa Degu Bekana]

Dear Lutz,

Thank you very much for your swift response; I truly appreciate it.