Interdisciplinary Teaching of Differential Equations for Life Sciences: Modeling The Cell Growth

The challenges in education include continuous improvement and searching for new strategies in the management of teaching and learning. Interdisciplinary teaching offers the possibility of improving the efficiency of the teaching-learning process by combining biological concepts or situations, making the simulation of natural phenomena and their mathematical and computational analysis. Using a previously made model, the proposed implementation included the study of cell cycle and its modeling with differential equations in order to give an interdisciplinary strategy for simulating the effect of five hypothetical anti-cancer candidates with inhibitory activity against regulators of the cell cycle. The in silico evaluation of the compounds was made by simulating the changes in the global cell mass in the model of the cell cycle. In all the cases, the inhibitors caused an increment in the cell mass. The uncontrolled increment in the replication of DNA and in the cell mass during the simulations can drive the cell destiny of the tumor cells to death. With this practical scenario, understanding the cell cycle with a model of system of differential equations allowed to highlight the power of modeling, making possible a connection to a language more suited to the interests of the students and develop skills for interpreting and make predictions. The link of systems of differential equations with different problems of the academic areas students is a motivational axis to consider in the teaching-learning process in mathematics.