Comet paper accepted
The comet paper’s been accepted to PLoS biology (Yay!) after a lot of work—easily the most I’ve ever done on a single project. The comet project, (or ‘In silico reconstitution of actin based symmetry-breaking and motility’ as I titled the paper) is really the first time I’ve been able to do the kind of science I’ve wanted to do for a long time—take a complex biological phenomenon and figure out what’s going on by simulating it a top-down computer model. By a top-down model, I mean that rather than throwing everything we know into the model, we simulate just enough to test the hypothesis. That way, if it works, we know exactly how it’s working.
I’m quite proud of the paper, and very grateful to my collaborators: Mark Landeryou for his help with some of the harder parts the programming (all of the thread programming and much of the VTK work), Orkun, Viviana and Dyche for pulling together the experimental data to check the predictions, and Alex for for his help and support with the model and the paper.