SCIENCE AT THE EDGE SEMINAR SERIES Interdisciplinary Physics Seminar Friday, 28 October 2011 at 11:30am Room 1400 Biomedical and Physical Sciences Bldg. Refreshments at 11:15 Speaker: Gianluca Ascolani Laboratory IMNC, CNRS-UMR8165, Orsay, France Title: Glioma Cells Exchanging Information Via Gap Junctions and Their Migration Process Abstract: One of the main aspects of studying diffuse tumors is understanding how they diffuse and how fast they spread. To shed light on these issues, we use an approach based on a microscopical description of the cells' dynamics to reproduce the evolution at the meso-macroscopical scale. An example of a tumor is the glioblastoma which grows in the brain and is very invasive. The glioma cells of the glioblastoma interact with other cancerous cells exchanging small molecules and ions through very short links named gap junction connections. We propose a model in the framework of automaton for the migration of cancerous cells that takes into consideration gap junctional exchange of information. The cells move on a single occupancy sites lattice and interact with the nearest neighbors. The interaction affects the motion of cells by imposing the condition of preserving at least one gap junction connection among the closest neighbors with a given probability. We show the hydrodynamic limit of the cells' diffusion equation in the mean field-approximation and the effects of gap junctions on the migration process of cancerous cells in terms of the two-points correlation function.