An interactive tool for animating biology, and its use in spatial and temporal modeling of a cancerous tumor and its microenvironment

Abstract

The ability to visualize the ongoing events of a computational model of biology is critical, both in order to see the dynamics of the biological system in action and to enable interaction with the model from which one can observe the resulting behavior. To this end, we have built a new interactive animation tool, SimuLife, for visualizing reactive models of cellular biology. SimuLife is web-based, and is freely accessible at http://simulife.weizmann.ac.il/. We have used SimuLife to animate a model that describes the development of a cancerous tumor, based on the individual components of the system and its environment. This has helped in understanding the dynamics of the tumor and its surrounding blood vessels, and in verifying the behavior, fine-tuning the model accordingly, and learning in which way different factors affect the tumor.