Computer simulation of the regenerative processes in the liver

A simplified model of the liver is used to study by means of a digital computer the reaction of an asynchronously reacting cellular population to disturbances of the steady state. On the basis of a previously described intracellular synthetic programme and the diffusion of repressors, the reaction of the liver model to “partial hepatectomy” was found to imitate well enough some particular features of the real regenerative process. The results obtained show that the reaction of a model consisting of many interacting individual elements (asynchronous cellular population) is very sensitive to variations of the parameters characterizing the system and can not be predicted even qualitatively without numerical experiments.