In this study we present a mathematical model describing the transport of sodium in a fluid circulating in a counter-current tubular architecture, which constitutes a simplified model of Henle's loop in a kidney nephron. The model explicitly takes into account the epithelial layer at the interface between the tubular lumen and the surrounding interstitium. In a specific range of parameters, we show that explicitly accounting for transport across the apical and basolateral membranes of epithelial cells, instead of assuming a single barrier, affects the axial concentration gradient, an essential determinant of the urinary concentrating capacity. We present the solution related to the stationary system, and we perform numerical simulations to understand the physiological behaviour of the system. We prove that when time grows large, our dynamic model converges towards the stationary system at an exponential rate. In order to prove rigorously this global asymptotic stability result, we study eigenproblems of an auxiliary linear operator and its dual.
.In these equations, r i , i = 1, 2, denotes the inner radius of tubule i, whereas r i,e denotes the outer radius of tubule i, which includes the epithelial layer. The fluxes J i describe the ionic exchanges between the different domains. They are modeled in the following way:Lumen. In the lumen, we consider the diffusion of Na + towards the epithelium. Then, J 1 = 2πr 1 P 1 (q 1 − u 1 ), J 2 = 2πr 2 P 2 (q 2 − u 2 ).
We study a model of cell segregation in a population composed of two cell types. Starting from a model initially proposed in [3], we aim to understand the impact of a cell division process on the system’s segregation abilities. The original model describes a population of spherical cells interacting with their close neighbors by means of a repulsion potential and which centers are subject to Brownian motion. Here, we add a stochastic birth-death process in the agent-based model, that approaches a logistic growth term in the continuum limit. We address the linear stability of the spatially homogeneous steady states of the macroscopic model and obtain a precise criterion for the phase transition, which links the system segregation ability to the model parameters. By comparing the criterion with the one obtained without logistic growth, we show that the system’s segregation ability is the result of a complex interplay between logistic growth, diffusion and mechanical repulsive interactions. Numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the results obtained at the microscopic scale.
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