Cels@Home

Cels@Home
Project
Status	Completed
Category	Biology and Medicine
Compute	CPU
Requires	None
Development
Developer	Muhammad H. Zaman
Author	Muhammad H. Zaman
Sponsor	University of Texas at Austin, Department of Biomedical Engineering
Initial release	June 23, 2008  (18 years ago)
Completed	Yes
Discontinued	September 1, 2009  (17 years ago) (approximate)
Software
Operating system	Windows
BOINC statistics
Total users	1,000+ (as of June 2,008)
Metadata
Website	http://cels-at-home-dev.dyndns.org/cels/ (defunct)

Cels@Home (styled CELS@Home, short for Cellular Environment in Living Systems @ Home) was a BOINC-based volunteer computing project that used donated processing power to model cell adhesion and cell migration. The project was led by Muhammad H. Zaman, then an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, and was intended to help researchers better understand the physical mechanisms by which cells move through the extracellular matrix, including the migration of cancerous cells during metastasis.

History

Cels@Home was announced in June 2008 as a new grid computing effort out of the Zaman Laboratory at UT Austin. In a university press release, Zaman described the project's approach as "a completely passive" one: a background program or screensaver ran computations whenever a volunteer's computer was otherwise idle, with no effort required from the user beyond installing the client. At launch, the project had attracted more than 1,000 participating computers, with volunteers reporting from countries including Argentina, Australia, China, Denmark, France, Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and Venezuela.

The project initially ran from a development server at cels-at-home-dev.dyndns.org before migrating to a production server at the university, celsathome.bme.utexas.edu. The client was Windows-only; work units were reported to be roughly 800 kB in size and to take approximately 3.5 hours to complete on a contemporary dual-core processor.

The project appears to have had a short operational life. By early 2009, national BOINC community trackers such as FormulaBoinc noted that the project had been flagged as inactive, citing a missing project administrator and disabled team functionality. By late 2009, project trackers including the AnandTech BOINC community list described both the original alpha server ("Cels@home (old)") and its successor ("Cels@Home (new)") as closed, with account creation disabled. This timing coincides with Zaman's departure from UT Austin to join Boston University in the fall of 2009. Retrospective European BOINC community references, such as the Alliance Francophone and BOINC Catalunya project pages, subsequently listed Cels@Home as a finished/terminated project.

The Main Building (UT Tower) at the University of Texas at Austin, home of the Department of Biomedical Engineering where Cels@Home was developed.

Research goals

Cell adhesion, migration, signaling, proliferation, and differentiation arise from complex, non-linear interactions between cells and the surrounding extracellular matrix. Cels@Home's stated research aims, as described by affiliated national BOINC community projects, were organized around two themes:

• Theory of cell–matrix interactions: developing physically grounded models of cell adhesion and migration extended to statistical thermodynamics, examining how the physical properties of tumor cells change at different stages of tumor formation and cancer progression, and how those physical properties interact with biochemical and extracellular mechanical properties in both two- and three-dimensional environments.
• Disease and cell migration: developing and applying high-resolution, large-scale computational and experimental methods to quantify the cell motility characteristic of specific diseases, particularly cancer and asthma, using high-resolution confocal microscopy of cancer cells combined with mathematical and computational models grounded in continuum mechanics and statistical physics.

A recurring theoretical tool in this area of cell-adhesion research is the description of individual receptor–ligand bonds as force-dependent, stochastic attachments. In the widely used Bell model of cell adhesion, the dissociation (off) rate of a single bond increases exponentially with the applied force $F$:

$k_{\text{off}}(F)=k_{\text{off}}^0\exp \left(\frac{F{x}_{\beta }}{k_{B}T}\right)$

where $k_{\text{off}}^0$ is the unstressed dissociation rate, $x_{\beta }$ is a characteristic bond reactive length, $k_B$ is the Boltzmann constant, and $T$ is absolute temperature. Force-balance and statistical-thermodynamics models of this general kind underpin the broader class of 3D cell-migration simulations that the Zaman laboratory worked on during the same period as Cels@Home, in which volunteer-donated computing time would have been used to explore large parameter spaces of adhesion strength, ligand concentration, and matrix mechanical properties.

Software and participation

A generalized schematic of the extracellular matrix, the physical environment through which migrating cells move.

Volunteers contributed computing time by installing the standard BOINC client and attaching to the Cels@Home project URL. The project distributed a screensaver that visualized the underlying computation while the client was idle, consistent with contemporary BOINC practice. A compiled video of BOINC project screensavers, including those from projects of this era, is embedded below for reference.

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BOINC Project Screensavers – Full Playlist

Scientific publications

An illustration of the metastatic cascade, the disease process that motivated Cels@Home's cell-migration research.

The following papers by the Zaman laboratory cover the same research area (computational modeling of cell adhesion and migration) but their acknowledgments sections credit only NIH funding and fellowships, with no mention of BOINC, distributed computing, or volunteer computing; two of the three were also published after Zaman's move to Boston University, following Cels@Home's apparent shutdown. They are listed here for background context only, and should not be treated as Cels@Home publications.

• Zaman, M. H., Trapani, L. M., Sieminski, A. L., MacKellar, D., Gong, H., Kamm, R. D., Wells, A., Lauffenburger, D. A., and Matsudaira, P. "Migration of tumor cells in 3D matrices is governed by matrix stiffness along with cell-matrix adhesion and proteolysis." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103(29), 10889–10894 (2006). Predates Cels@Home's 2008 launch; authors based at the Whitehead Institute/MIT, funded by NIH grants 1-R01-GM-076689 and GM069668 and a Sokol Foundation Fellowship. . DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0604460103.
• Harjanto, D., and Zaman, M. H. "Computational study of proteolysis-driven single cell migration in a three-dimensional matrix." Annals of Biomedical Engineering 38(5), 1815–1825 (2010). Authors based at Boston University; acknowledgments credit only NIH grant 1R01CA132633. . DOI: 10.1007/s10439-010-9970-0.
• Vargas, D. A., and Zaman, M. H. "Computational model for migration of a cell cluster in three-dimensional matrices." Annals of Biomedical Engineering 39(7), 2068–2079 (2011). Authors based at Boston University; acknowledgments credit only NIH grant 1R01CA132633. . DOI: 10.1007/s10439-011-0290-9.

See also

• BOINC
• BOINC projects