TY - JOUR T1 - Stochastic model of contact inhibition and the proliferation of melanoma <em>in situ</em> JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/110007 SP - 110007 AU - Mauro Cesar Cafundó de Morais AU - Izabella Stuhl AU - Alan Utsuni Sabino AU - Willian Wagner Lautenschlager AU - Alexandre Sarmento Queiroga AU - Tharcisio Citrangulo Tortelli, Jr. AU - Roger Chammas AU - Yuri Suhov AU - Alexandre Ferreira Ramos Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/02/20/110007.abstract N2 - Contact inhibition is a central feature orchestrating cell proliferation in culture experiments with its loss being associated with malignant transformation and tumorigenesis. We performed a co-culture experiment with human metastatic melanoma cell line (SK-MEL-147) and immortalized keratinocyte cells (HaCaT). After 8 days a spatial pattern was detected, characterized by the formation of clusters of melanoma cells surrounded by keratinocytes constraining their proliferation. In addition, we observed that the proportion of melanoma cells within the total population has increased. To explain our results we propose a spatial stochastic model (following a philosophy of the Widow-Rowlinson model from Statistical Physics and Molecular Chemistry) where we consider cell proliferation, death, migration, and cell-to-cell interaction through contact inhibition. Our numerical simulations demonstrate that loss of contact inhibition is a sufficient mechanism, appropriate for an explanation of the increase on the proportion of tumor cells and generation of spatial patterns established in conducted experiments. ER -