Related papers: Non-linear mechanical response of the Red Blood Ce…
Membrane tension is an acknowledged regulator of a wide array of cell functions; however, whether it acts locally or globally in different contexts remains debated. Recent experiments that locally perturb tension and measure the response…
The linear viscoelastic behavior of the red blood cell membrane of mammal and human was studied in previous works proposing different experimental methods to determine their viscoelastic parameters. In the present work the nonlinear…
Red Blood Cells (RBCs) are the simplest cell types with complex dynamical and viscoelastic phenomenology. While the mechanical rigidity and the flickering noise of RBCs have been extensively investigated, an accurate determination of the…
Red blood cells (RBCs) sustain mechanical stresses associated with microcirculatory flow through ATP-driven plasma membrane flickering. This is an active phenomenon driven by motor proteins that regulate interactions between the spectrin…
We analyze fluctuations of particle displacements and stresses in a sheared athermal suspension of elastic capsules (red blood cells). Upon variation of the volume fraction from the dilute up to the highly concentrated regime, our numerical…
Stressed soft materials commonly present viscoelastic signatures in the form of power-law or exponential decay. Understanding the origins of such rheologic behaviors is crucial to find proper technological applications. Using an elastic…
We use mesoscale numerical simulations to investigate the unsteady dynamics of a single red blood cell (RBC) subjected to an external mechanical load. We carry out a detailed comparison between the {\it loading} (L) dynamics, following the…
Mechanical characteristics of single biological cells are used to identify and possibly leverage interesting differences among cells or cell populations. Fluidity---hysteresivity normalized to the extremes of an elastic solid or a viscous…
Motivated by the reported peculiar dynamics of a red blood cell in shear flow, we develop an analytical theory for the motion of a nearly--spherical fluid particle enclosed by a visco--elastic incompressible interface in linear flows. The…
Blood leukocytes can exhibit extensive morphological changes during their passage through small capillary vessels. The human monocytic THP-1 cell line was used to explore the metabolic dependence of these shape changes. Cells were aspirated…
The deformability of human red blood cells (RBCs), which comprise almost 99% of the cells in whole blood, is largely related not only to pathophysiological blood flow but also to the levels of intracellular compounds. Therefore, statistical…
Via computer simulations, we provide evidence that the shear rate induced red blood cell tumbling-to-tank-treading transition also occurs at quite high volume fractions, where collective effects are important. The transition takes place as…
We report the simultaneous characterization of time- and force-dependent mechanical properties of adherent cells in the physiologically relevant regime of large forces. We used magnetic tweezers to apply forces to magnetic beads bound to…
We have developed a novel scanning probe-based methodology to study cell biomechanics. The time dependence of the force exerted by the cell surface on a scanning probe at constant local deformation has been used to extract local…
Osmotic conditions play an important role in the cell properties of human red blood cells (RBCs), which are crucial for the pathological analysis of some blood diseases such as malaria. Over the past decades, numerous efforts have mainly…
Motivated by the complex rheological behaviors observed in small/micro scale blood vessels, such as the Fahraeus effect, plasma-skimming, shear-thinning, etc., we develop a non-linear suspension model for blood. The viscosity is assumed to…
Cell mechanical properties are fundamental to the organism but remain poorly understood. We report a comprehensive phenomenological framework for the nonlinear rheology of single fibroblast cells: a superposition of elastic stiffening and…
We study the shearing rheology of dense suspensions of elastic capsules, taking aggregation-free red blood cells as a physiologically relevant example. Particles are non-Brownian and interact only via hydrodynamics and short-range repulsive…
Mechanical signaling plays a key role in biological processes like embryo development and cancer growth. One prominent way to probe mechanical properties of tissues is to study their response to externally applied forces. Using a…
During the aging of the red-blood cell, or under conditions of extreme echinocytosis, membrane is shed from the cell plasma membrane in the form of nano-vesicles. We propose that this process is the result of the self-adaptation of the…