Three-dimensional simulations of the cell growth and cytokinesis using the immersed boundary method

•We present 3D IBM for the simulation of cell growth and cytokinesis.•A surface remeshing algorithm is applied to prevent the mesh distortion.•To keep the cell volume during cytokinesis, we use a volume-conserving algorithm.

In this paper, we present a three-dimensional immersed boundary method to simulate the eukaryotic cell growth and cytokinesis. The proposed model and numerical method are a non-trivial three-dimensional extension of the previous work (Li et al., 2012). Unstructured triangular meshes are employed to discretize the cell membrane. The nodes of the surface mesh constitute a set of Lagrangian control points used to track the motion of the cell. A surface remeshing algorithm is applied to prevent mesh distortion during evolution. We also use a volume-conserving algorithm to maintain the mass of cells in cytokinesis. The ability of the proposed method to simulate cell growth and division processes is numerically demonstrated.