Computer Models of Individual Living Cells in Cell Populations

The biosynthetic capacity of an individual cell is dependent on its structure. The response of large population of cells reflects the aggregated response of individual cells. Individual cell’s differ from one and another. The use of population balance equations to describe the dynamic response of populations to perturbations in their environment is computationally difficult when both the structure of individual cells and their distribution within the population are important. We circumvent these computational problems by building highly structured models of individual cells and then using a finite-representation technique to model the whole population. Application of this technique to predicting protein production from recombinant DNA is described.