Numerical Analysis of the Immersed Boundary Method for Cell-Based Simulation

Mathematical modelling provides a useful framework within which to investigate the organization of biological tissues. With advances in experimental biology leading to increasingly detailed descriptions of cellular behavior, models that consider cells as individual objects are becoming a common tool to study how processes at the single-cell level affect collective dynamics and determine tissue size, shape, and function. However, there often remains no comprehensive account of these models, their method of solution, computational implementation, or analysis of parameter scaling, hindering our ability to utilize and accurately compare different models. Here we present an efficient, open-source implementation of the immersed boundary (IB) method, tailored to simulate the dynamics of cell populations. This approach considers the dynamics of elastic membranes, representing cell boundaries, immersed in a viscous Newtonian fluid. The IB method enables complex and emergent cell shape dynamics, spatially heterogeneous cell properties, and precise control of growth mechanisms. We solve the model numerically using an established algorithm, based on the fast Fourier transform, providing full details of all technical aspects of our implementation. The implementation is undertaken within Chaste, an open-source C++ library that allows one to easily change constitutive assumptions. Our implementation scales linearly with time step, and subquadratically with mesh spacing and immersed boundary node spacing. We identify the relationship between the immersed boundary node spacing and fluid mesh spacing required to ensure fluid volume conservation within immersed boundaries, and the scaling of cell membrane stiffness and cell-cell interaction strength required when refining the immersed boundary discretization. Finally, we present a simulation study of a growing epithelial tissue to demonstrate the applicability of our implementation to relevant biological questions, highlighting several features of the IB method that make it well suited to address certain questions in epithelial morphogenesis.