A cellular automaton for modeling non-trivial biomembrane ruptures

• Published in: Soft matter Vol. 15; no. 2; pp. 4178 - 4186
• Main Authors: Gupta, Abhay, Gözen, Irep, Taylor, Michael
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England 2019
• ISSN: 1744-683X; 1744-6848; 1744-6848
• DOI: 10.1039/c8sm02032a

A novel cellular automaton (CA) for simulating biological membrane rupture is proposed. Constructed via simple rules governing deformation, tension, and fracture, the CA incorporates ideas from standard percolation models and bond-based fracture methods. The model is demonstrated by comparing simulations with experimental results of a double bilayer lipid membrane expanding on a solid substrate. Results indicate that the CA can capture non-trivial rupture morphologies such as floral patterns and the saltatory dynamics of fractal avalanches observed in experiments. Moreover, the CA provides insight into the poorly understood role of inter-layer adhesion, supporting the hypothesis that the density of adhesion sites governs rupture morphology. A cellular automaton capturing experimentally observed floral and fractal avalanche rupture morphologies in self-spreading double lipid bilayers.