CFSE analysis of a proliferating cell population is a popular tool for the study of cell division and divisionlinked changes in cell behavior. Recently Banks et al. (2011), Luzyanina et al. (2009), Luzyanina et al. (2007), a partial differential equation (PDE) model to describe lymphocyte dynamics in a CFSE proliferation assay was proposed. We present a significant revision of this model which improves the physiological understanding of several parameters. Namely, the parameter used previously as a heuristic explanation for the dilution of CFSE dye by cell division is replaced with a more physical component, cellular autofluorescence. The rate at which label decays is also quantified using a Gompertz decay process. We then demonstrate a revised method of fitting the model to the commonly used histogram representation of the data. It is shown that these improvements result in a model with a strong physiological basis which is fully capable of replicating the behavior observed in the data.

This research was supported in part by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease under grant NIAID 9R01AI071915, in part by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research under grant AFOSR-FA9550-09-1-0226, in part by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (Grant 11-01-00117), in part by the Program of the Russian Academy of Sciences Basic Research for Medicine, in part by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, Grant No. ANR-09-BLAN-0218 TOPPAZ, in part by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and in part by grant SAF2010-21336 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. The authors are also grateful to referees for constructive comments and suggestions for improvements in this manuscript.