Multicellular System Dynamics Lab

The Multicellular System Dynamics Lab is part of the Mechatronics, Biostatistics and Sensors Division of the KU Leuven. We are interested in how complex biological structures such as cells and tissues may emerge from simple interactions between their underlying components. For this, we study the organization dynamics and mechanical properties of cells and cell communities using a combination of mechanical measurements and particle-based computational models. During the past 10 years we developed a powerful and extensible simulation tool called Mpacts, a modular particle-based simulation framework in Python. Along the way we developed experimental expertise in determining and obtaining relevant parameters needed for physically accurate simulations, for example by means of atomic force microscopy.