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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2014 Aug 29.
Published in final edited form as: Phys Biol. 2012 Feb 7;9(1):016010. doi: 10.1088/1478-3975/9/1/016010

Figure 6.

Figure 6

The ‘piston test’ demonstrates the shortcoming of the strictly local dynamics of the cellular Potts formalism (panel A) and our suggested solution that enforces mechanical relaxation (panel B). Cells adhere to the ECM surface (shown in green), which is shifted one pixel every Tshift=100 MCS, thus the speed of the piston is rather slow, 0.6 μm/h. Cells in the bulk cannot adjust to the changing boundary and holes appear near the attachment surface. The holes expand and finally the cells separate from the adhesive surface. The images show the moving ECM boundary, the aggregate extends to the left where it has free boundaries. The four configurations in panels A and B depict the 110 μm wide interface area of a 500 × 500 μm2 system at t=0,1000,3000 and 5000 MCS, i.e., t=0, 16, 50 and 83 hours. The full time sequence is shown in Movie 2.