Dr. Bradford Peercy, Department of Mathematics And Statistics.
We use Drosophila egg chambers to study cell migration by creating a geometrically-realistic model of the egg chambers and then using that to determine the distribution of chemoattractants using a reaction-diffusion system. We have solved a one-dimensional reaction-diffusion partial differential equation analytically and plotted the analytical solution as well as an explicit finite difference and finite element solutions in Matlab. We then generalized the code to solve a two-dimensional reaction-diffusion partial differential equation using the actual geometry of a Drosophilia egg chamber.