Center for Plant Molecular Biology

Gabriella Mosca lab

Biomechanical Modeling of Morphogenesis (BM2)

Software

We develop MorphoMechanX which is an AddOn of the modeling and image processing + analysis framework MorphoDynamX

MorphoMechanX is mainly (but not exclusively) a FEM-based platform to model 3D multicellular tissue growth, both in the continuous tissue limit and at cellular resolution
The cells are modeled as hollow structure filled by turgor pressure and surrounded by the cell wall, which is modeled using the principles of Continuum Mechanics as a deformable material which can also undergoe growth. The genetic signaling is superimposed and can act at cellular or subcellular level (or move overthe cell wall ) and communicates with the mechanical simulations. 

The software is based on C++ and parallelize with CUDA, which makes it competitively fast and enables us to deal with big meshes, so that we can model tissue grow realistically. 

A great advantage of MorphoMechanX is that, since it is part of MoprhoDynamX one can start from confocal image data and end with a full simulation setup all within one single platform, besides this, since it is in-house built, it is highly customizable.