4–6 Oct 2023
Biozentrum, University of Würzburg
Europe/Berlin timezone

Simulating Trypanosome Motility

Not scheduled
20m
Room A101 (Biozentrum, University of Würzburg)

Room A101

Biozentrum, University of Würzburg

Am Hubland
Poster

Speaker

Florian Overberg

Description

We investigate motility of the protozoan Trypanosoma, using numerical simulations. We have established a trypanosome model (see Fig. 1), which is motivated by experimental observations [1, 2] and builds upon the previously proposed model [3, 4]. The cell body is represented by a set of vertices which are distributed homogeneously on a pre-defined elongated surface and form a triangulated elastic network of springs. The network model also incorporates bending rigidity, and area and volume conservation constraints. For parasite propulsion, a flagellum is attached to the cell body. The flagellum is constructed from four parallely placed filaments, two of which are embedded into the body, and the other two are used for the generation of a propagating bending wave [5]. Flagellum beating leads to a deformation of the body and generates propulsion. We study the behavior of this model for different body stiffnesses, beating frequencies,wavelengths, and amplitudes. The simulations achieve values for the swimming velocity
and the body rotation around its swimming axis, which are at the same order of magnitude as experimental measurements. The trypanosome model is flexible enough and can be adapted to reproduce the behavior of different trypanosome species. This model will be used to investigatetrypanosome locomotion in blood stream.

Primary author

Co-authors

Dmitry Fedosov (Institute of Biological Information Processing, Forschungszentrum Juelich) Gerhard Gompper (Forschungszentrum Jülich)

Presentation materials

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