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Updated: Jun 22, 2025

Quantifying Spatiotemporal Parameters of Cellular Exocytosis in Micropatterned Cells
Published on: September 16, 2020
Poissonian Cellular Potts Models Reveal Nonequilibrium Kinetics of Cell Sorting
R Belousov1, S Savino1,2, P Moghe3,4
1Cell Biology and Biophysics Unit, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Meyerhofstraße 1, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany.
Abstract:
Cellular Potts models are broadly applied across developmental biology and cancer research. We overcome limitations of the traditional approach, which reinterprets a modified Metropolis sampling as ad hoc dynamics, by introducing a physical timescale through Poissonian kinetics and by applying principles of stochastic thermodynamics to separate thermal and relaxation effects from athermal noise and nonconservative forces. Our method accurately describes cell-sorting dynamics in mouse-embryo development and identifies the distinct contributions of nonequilibrium processes, e.g., cell growth and active fluctuations.
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