Quantitative modelling of neural development: On the origins of glioma and cortical layers.

In this talk I will present two separate lines of work in the context to neural development. First, I will present a mathematical model for the age-dependent formation of glioma, which is the most common form of primary brain tumor (Bauer2014a). We base our model upon experimentally derived parameters to account for demographic data on glioma incidence, and predict the minimal number of oncogenic mutations required for the initiation of glioma formation.

In the second part of this talk I will present currently ongoing work on cortical layer formation in normal and diseased brain development. In particular, we simulate how, starting from a few initial progenitor cells, a layered cortex arises via proliferation, differentation and migration, and how this process can go wrong. The simulated cell behaviours depend on the dynamic interaction between gene-type encoding as well as extracellular communication.