MCell

MCell and CellBlender development is an ongoing collaboration between researchers at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the Department of Computational and Systems Biology of the University of Pittsburgh, and the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, with support from the National Institutes of Health, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the National Science Foundation.

Cells are tightly packed with structures and molecules that carry out the day-to-day operations of living. Understanding how cellular design dictates function is essential to understanding life and disease, in the brain, heart, or elsewhere. MCell (Monte Carlo cell) is a program that uses spatially realistic 3-D cellular models and specialized Monte Carlo algorithms to simulate the movements and reactions of molecules within and between cells—cellular microphysiology.

Model design, editing, and visualization are integral to microphysiological simulations. CellBlender is an addon for Blender 2.6x that allows users to create computational cell biology models for use in MCell. In addition, it is used to visualize MCell simulation results, including the locations and states of participating meshes and molecules.