By Kimberly Mann Bruch, SDSC Communications
News – According to the World Health Organization, one in six deaths worldwide has been diagnosed with cancer; however, these deaths were not the result of primary malignant tumors – the deaths were caused by the spread of cancer cells to surrounding tumors and subsequent tumor growth.
These figs, which are largely made up of collagen, have been the focus of a recent collaborative study by a team from Stanford University and Purdue University. To accomplish the task, the researchers used the Comet supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, located on the UC San Diego campus.
“Our code used for this analysis is computerized, which means it will take a long time to run a single simulation, and thanks to Comet we were able to run a large number of simulations simultaneously to study a wide parametric space, ”said Taeyoon Kim, associate professor at Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering. “Today, it is very challenging to find donations or money that can be used to buy nodes or time on supercomputers even though such computing power is essential for this research.”
The study describes the mechanical process of cell division begins when a mother undergoes major changes in shape to separate her chromosomes and other substances before they themselves are cleared in two daughter cells. Many multivariate studies have focused on the biological aspects of cell division, but this research describes the process from a recent mechanical point of view. Advanced science magazine paper entitled “Cell Pushing Forces During Mitotic Drive Mitosis in Collagen Gels.”
“Our study focused on cancer cell division because that is what drives the growth of primary and metastatic tumors,” said Ovijit Chaudhuri, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford. “Although the biology of cancer cell division has been studied in detail, the mechanical aspects of how cells physically divide in tumors are less clear, and by advancing an understanding of this that could provide new treatments to treat tumors. ”
Prior to this research, there has been no study of how physically dividing cells in collagen gels. The researchers examined three potential mechanisms for localized cells that need to be divided: mitotic expansion, external force generation (pushing), or matrix contamination. The findings of this study identified the pushing mechanism as a key feature in allowing mitosis to occur.
“Although this process has been extensively studied on petri dishes – or plastic sheets – cells in our cigarettes need to do this while they are surrounded by cells and scaffolding called the extracellular matrix. , ”Explained Chaudhuri. “In our recent study, we report on how the mother cell pushes on its surroundings during division to make room for the daughter cells. ”
Chaudhuri and Kim worked on this project with Sungmin Nam, who is currently a postdoctoral fellow in cell and print engineering at Harvard, and Yung-Hao Lin, a doctoral student in chemical engineering at Stanford. Kim was responsible for a computer study of the mechanical interaction between cell division and the environment around them. To obtain computational data, it required many samples of modeling cells that separated in the collagen matrix, and Comet it gave a good choice for the job.
This work was supported by a Samsung scholarship to Nam, a National Institute of Medical Sciences R01 (1R01GM126256) to Kim, and a National Institute of Health Cancer Institute (R37CA214136) to Chaudhuri. This operation used ACI XSEDE allocation number – 1548562. The calculations were made on the Comet supercomputer, backed by NSF award number ACI – 1341698, at SDSC.
About SDSC
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is a leader and pioneer in high-performance and data-intensive computing, providing facilities, services, and cyber-structured knowledge to the national research community, academics, and industry. Located on the UC San Diego campus, SDSC supports hundreds of multidisciplinary programs spanning a wide range of fields, from astronauts and earth sciences to disease research and drug discovery. In December 2020, the latest supercomputer was funded by SDSC, Expanse, into production. At more than twice the performance Comet, Expanse supports the SDSC theme of ‘Borderless Computing’ with a data-centric architecture, public cloud integration, and state-of-the-art GPUs for integrating experimental and remote computing facilities.