Difference between revisions of "CometWiki"

This site describes the set up and usage of `comet', an actin-based bead motility simulator.

Actin is a polymer built by cells that allows them to move. Actin-based bead motility is an in vitro model system used to study how our cells produce force and move, carried out by coating a bead with proteins that tell the cell to polymerize actin, and putting the bead a solution that mimics the material inside cells. This causes an actin network to build around the bead. Surprisingly even when the bead is spherically symmetric, rather than just buiding a symmetric shell that gets bigger and bigger, it moves off in 'comet tail' of actin. This bead motility simulater aims to help us understand how this process works.

Simulator Output

• Examples
• The effect of changing the main parameters

Essential Information

Installing the program

comet runs on any unix-like operating system, including OS X, Linux or Windows (under cygwin).

• Instructions for downloading and installing comet

Running the program

The program is called from the command line. The command line parameters tell the program what to do (calculate a new run, re-process existing data, interactive 3D view etc.). A cometparams.ini file in the working directory tells the program detailed information about the model parameters to use for calculation and display.

• Command line parameters for the comet program
• Model settings in the cometparams.ini file
• Display settings in the cometparams.ini file
• Running comet on a cluster

How the program works

• Overview of How the comet program works
• Implementation

In Depth

• Tracking network movement and making measurements

Code Status

• Source Repository
• Source Files
• Download Binaries

• Known Issues
• To Do

• Using Git