Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands.
Med Biol Eng Comput. 2011 Dec;49(12):1447-57. doi: 10.1007/s11517-011-0802-7. Epub 2011 Jul 15.
We consider the accumulation and formation of lipid droplets in an adipocyte cell. The process incorporates adipose nucleation (adipogenesis) and growth. At later stages, there will be merging of droplets and growth of larger droplets at the expense of the smaller droplets, which will essentially undergo lipolysis. The process is modeled by the use of the Cahn-Hilliard equation, which is mass-conserving and allows the formation of secondary phases in the context of spinodal decomposition. The volume of fluid (VOF) method is used to determine the total area that is occupied by the lipids in a given cross section. Further, we present an algorithm, applicable to all kinds of grids (structured or unstructured) in two spatial dimensions, to count the number of lipid droplets and the portion of the domain of computation that is occupied by the lipid droplets as a function of time during the process. The results are preliminary and are validated from a qualitative point using experiments carried out on cell cultures. It turns out that the Cahn-Hilliard theory can model many of the features during adipogenesis qualitatively.
我们研究脂肪细胞中脂滴的积累和形成。这个过程包括脂肪生成（adipogenesis）和生长。在后期，脂滴会融合，较大的脂滴会在较小的脂滴的基础上生长，而较小的脂滴将经历脂肪分解。这一过程通过使用 Cahn-Hilliard 方程来建模，该方程是质量守恒的，并允许在旋度分解的背景下形成二级相。体积流体（VOF）方法用于确定给定横截面上脂质所占据的总区域。此外，我们提出了一种适用于所有类型网格（结构化或非结构化）的二维空间的算法，以在该过程中计算脂质滴的数量以及计算域中被脂质滴占据的部分随时间的变化。这些结果是初步的，并通过在细胞培养上进行的实验从定性角度进行了验证。结果表明，Cahn-Hilliard 理论可以定性地模拟脂肪生成过程中的许多特征。
