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Extracellular gaps in Drosophila egg chamber likely affect distribution of chemical signals that govern border cell specification and migration.

Collective cell migration is one of the many known biological mechanisms involved in organogenesis, and therefore is critically required. Border cells in Drosophila egg chambers are one of the most extensively used model to understand collective cell migration. JAK/STAT (Janus kinase/Signal transducer and activator of transcription) signaling is an extensively studied regulatory network for border cell migration (BCM) in Drosophila ovary that is also conserved and involved in organogenesis. In egg chambers, the anterior polar cells secrete Unpaired (Upd), which, when received by the surrounding follicle cells, activates the JAK/STAT cascade and specifies follicle cells into border cells1. Here, we propose to characterize Mind bomb 2 (Mib2) as a regulator of cytoskeleton proteins in fruit fly egg chambers. Mib2 is an E3 ubiquitin ligase involved in regulation of target protein fate. Mib2 is also important for the maintenance of Myosin in Drosophila musculature3. Earlier studies from our lab using RNA interference suggest the involvement of Mib2 in border cell migration2. We aim to characterize further the mode of action for Mib2 in migratory cell regulation and cellular cytoskeleton maintenance.

In this article we present our three dimensional mathematical model of collective cell migration and describe the method by which we developed and implemented this package on the High Performance Computing Facility at UMBC. Specifically, we describe our motivation and the results of a new interface to define initial conditions for the three dimensional system, specify implementation constraints and solutions for the HPCF regarding post-processing, and outline several implementation changes that we made in order to achieve improved computation time.