Evaluation of motility and proliferation of transformed cell lines by computational analysis and in silico simulation

Cell migration plays a crucial role in different pathological conditions, so a good understanding of the intra and extra cellular mechanisms involved could help in the development of new therapeutical strategies. Time-lapse microscopy is an excellent tool for dynamically studying cell movement. This work reports the development and testing of an integrated analysis environment based on MotoCell, a web application able to simultaneously manage time-lapse experiments, perform comparative analysis of multiple experiments extracting movement parameters, test models describing cell movement and proliferation and simulate the behaviour of cells growing on Petri dish via a simulation tool able to reproduce and predict the behaviour of cultured cells. The system includes additional tools that deal with acquisition and analysis of microscopy images and graphical representation of datasets containing cell paths obtained by tracking procedures