Possible roles of mechanical cell elimination intrinsic to growing tissues from the perspective of tissue growth efficiency and homeostasis
Fig 3
Cell elimination rate and fitness in a pure population.
(A) Dependence of the cell elimination rate ε (green circles) and the cellular fitness ϕCell (= ϕTissue) (purple crosses) on mechanical/growth parameters in simulations, which can be well approximated by Gaussian-type functions (solid green and dashed purple lines), ε = Exp[-α(ζ-β)2]+γ, where ζ represents any one of the mechanical/growth parameters (Λ, Γ, θT1, κ and μ). Parameters: (α, β, γ) = (245, 0.24, 0) for Λ, (1800, 0.076, 0) for Γ, (12.5, 0.465, 0.0875) for θT1, (0.095, 5.2, 0.039) for κ, (0.0016, 24.3, -0.31) for μ. (B) Time evolution of the elimination rate ε in a case with the reference parameter set (see the red circles in Fig 3A; Λ = 0.14, Γ = 0.04, θT1 = 0.1, κ = 0 and μ = 3.47×10−3); the red line is the average at each time point over 10 trials shown by the gray lines. The black line is the temporal average of the red line. Since the variation in elimination rate is not large during tissue growth when the number of cells ranges from N = 250 to N = 20,000, we adopt its temporal average as the typical value of the elimination rate for each parameter set.