Virtual Sponge Models

Introduction

In this section we model the water flux in living sponges. As we could not test our constructs in living sponges (sponges are fragile organisms, bringing them to paris and then growing them is complicated), we relied on models in order to find out: what would be the effectiveness of our constructs in living sponges ?

More precisely we are interested in finding: what is the quantity of compound that is in contact with our bacterium ?

With this quantity and the number of bacteria in the sponge, we can the connect with the models developed for PCB and phenol (TODO) sensing and then relate the sensing capacity to the concentration of compound in the surrounding water.

To answer this question, we built two different model :

1. A simple model where we consider only water flows without trying to take into acount the very specific geometry of the sponge.
2. A 2D diffusion model where we take into acount the geometry of the sponge.

Throughout this section we base our study on the Spongia Officinalis species, because i) there are evidences that pseudovibrio bacteria live inside (TODO: cite) and ii) its is a quite common type of sponge.

Model 1: Simple Fluxes

For this model, we make simple computations based on the intake and expeled quantities of water. Our main assumptions are the following :

1. Our bacteria are uniformely distributed in the sponge
2. Compounds diffuse instantly inside the sponge (the quantity of compound in the same everywhere inside)

These two assumptions imply that each bacterium is in contact with the same quantity of compound.

Model Formulation

We call φ_in (in ml/h/cm³) the quantity of compound (<= 0.2 μm) entering a sponge of volume V (cm³). Then the quantity of compound, Q, in contact with the bacteria per hour is:

Q = φ_inV