What is it about?
How do cells know how to change shape, move through tissues, or respond to their surroundings? These processes are essential during development, wound healing, and diseases such as cancer, but they are difficult to observe in detail using experiments alone. In this study, we developed BIOPOINT, a computer model that represents cells as thousands of interacting particles. Unlike previous models, BIOPOINT can simulate both the cell's nucleus and its interactions with the surrounding extracellular matrix using measurements taken directly from experiments. This allows us to predict how cells spread, squeeze through tight spaces, and respond to mechanical forces. By combining experimental data with realistic computer simulations, BIOPOINT provides researchers with a new open-source tool to investigate how physical forces shape cells and tissues, helping us better understand development, disease, and tissue engineering.
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Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Cells constantly experience physical forces that influence how they grow, move, and function. Understanding these forces is essential for studying development, wound healing, cancer, and tissue engineering, but experiments alone cannot reveal every detail. BIOPOINT combines experimental measurements with realistic computer simulations to create a digital model of living cells that predicts how they respond to mechanical forces. Unlike many existing models, it captures both the cell nucleus and its interactions with the surrounding environment within a single, experimentally grounded framework. Because BIOPOINT is open source and adaptable, it provides researchers with a practical platform for exploring how physical forces shape cell behaviour across many biological systems.
Perspectives
For me, the most exciting aspect of BIOPOINT is its potential beyond this paper. I see it as the foundation of a growing ecosystem of experimentally grounded digital cell models that researchers can adapt, refine, and build upon. I look forward to seeing how the community uses it to explore new biological questions, inspire collaborations between experimentalists and computational scientists, and uncover how the mechanics of cells influence health and disease. The best scientific software, in my view, is software that enables discoveries its creators never anticipated.
Sandipan Chattaraj
Universita degli Studi di Pavia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: BIOPOINT: A particle-based model for probing nuclear mechanics and cell-ECM interactions via experimentally derived parameters, PLoS Computational Biology, March 2026, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014113.
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