Modeling cell electrotactic response to different electric field strengths

Understanding electrotaxis, the motion of cells subject to an external electric field, could inform strategies for wound healing devices and slowing cancer spread. A mechanistic understanding of electrotaxis is still lacking. Here, we present an agent-based computational model to study the motility dynamics of isolated cranial neural crest cells subject to varying field strength and polarity of an external direct current electric field for a duration of three hours. The model accounts for features of cell-cell interactions, and field-directed migration. The model uniquely captures the aspects of cell growth and division, cell pressure-based apoptosis, and growth suppression dynamics. We compare our model with experiments and show a qualitative agreement of directionality, cell migration speed for different field strengths, ranging from (30 – 200) V/m, and compare these quantities across low and high densities. Our results suggest that (i) cell-cell interactions together with cell-electric field interaction regulates cell motility response, displacement and directionality, to external electric field, and (ii) cellular response to electric field is independent of cell density, a result also seen experimentally.