Computational Modeling of Reaction and Diffusion Processes in Mammalian Cell

Abstract: PAHs are the reactive toxic chemical compounds which are present as environmental pollutants. These reactive compounds not only diffuse through the membranes of the cell but also partition into the membranes. They react with the DNA of the cell giving rise to toxicity and may cause cancer. To understand the cellular behavior of these foreign compounds, a mathematical model including the reaction-diffusion system and partitioning phenomenon has been developed. In order to reduce the complex structure of the cytoplasm due to the presence of many thin membranes, and to make the model less computationally expensive and numerically treatable, homogenization techniques have been used. The resulting complex system of PDEs generated from the model is implemented in Comsol Multiphysics. The numerical results obtained from the model show a nice agreement with the in vitro cell experimental results. Then the model was reduced to a system of ODEs, a compartment model (CM). The quantitative analysis of the results of the CM shows that it cannot fully capture the features of metabolic system considered in general. Thus the PDE model affords a more realistic representation. In order to see the influence of cell geometry in drug diffusion, the non-spherical axi-symmetric cell geometry is considered, where we showed that the cellular geometry plays an important role in diffusion through the membranes. For further reduction of complexity of the model, another simplified model was developed. In the simplified model, we used PDEs for the extracellular domain, cytoplasm and nucleus, whereas the plasma and nuclear membranes were taken away, and replaced by the membrane flux, using Fick's Law. We further extended the framework of our previously developed model by benchmarking against the results from four different cell lines. Global optimization techniques are used for the parameters describing the diffusion and reaction to fit the measured data. Numerical results were in good agreement with the in vitro results. For the further development of the model, the process of surface bound reactions were added, thus developing a new cell model. The effective equations were derived using iterative homogenization for this model. The numerical results of some of the species were qualitatively verified against the in vitro results found in literature.