Multiscale computational framework for predicting viscoelasticity of red blood cells in aging and mechanical fatigue

Dynamics of a lipid vesicle across a microfluidic constriction: how do its membrane properties and microenvironment matter?

“…The above results obtained via modulation of the viscosity ratio appear clear in explaining the altered dynamics of the RBCs in human vascular pathways with ageing, on the account of an increase in cytosolic viscosity (Ma et al. 2022) due to the increased concentration of haemoglobin molecules, to an extent up to three- to fivefold with reference to the average value of the same over the healthy life cycle of RBCs (~5.5 mPa s).…”

“…For a quantitative mechanistic insight on the same, see supplementary material, figure S6, which reveals that for a fixed position on the interface (corresponding to a fixed polar angle 𝜃), the magnitude of the traction force increases with the increase in viscosity ratio, realizing an enhanced stretching ratio with an increase in 𝜂 r until 𝜂 opt is reached. The above results obtained via modulation of the viscosity ratio appear clear in explaining the altered dynamics of the RBCs in human vascular pathways with ageing, on the account of an increase in cytosolic viscosity (Ma et al 2022) due to the increased concentration of haemoglobin molecules, to an extent up to three-to fivefold with reference to the average value of the same over the healthy life cycle of RBCs (∼5.5 mPa s). Similar phenomenology may manifest in certain diseased conditions (for example, malaria) due to the polymerization of haemoglobin as a common pathological artefact in infected RBCs.…”

Dynamic response of red blood cells in health and disease

“…52 It is also presumed that surface area by volume ratio, cytoplasmic viscosity and surface alteration of the cytoskeletal network of the membrane play a pivotal role in the cell's deformational response. 28–30,53…”

“…52 It is also presumed that surface area by volume ratio, cytoplasmic viscosity and surface alteration of the cytoskeletal network of the membrane play a pivotal role in the cell's deformational response. [28][29][30]53 To investigate these aspects of cell behaviour, we subjected the membrane ends of the cell to an extreme tensile creep load of 200 pN for a duration of a few seconds and removed the applied load to observe cell relaxation for healthy, type 2 diabetic and malaria-infected cells considered earlier, along with a diverse class of other pathological cells attributed with different constitutive as well as geometric properties as compared to the healthy red blood cell. These diseased cells are modelled by varying membrane viscosity, shear modulus and reduced volume, represented by non-dimensional variables,…”

A combined computational and experimental investigation of the filtration function of splenic macrophages in sickle cell disease

“…DPD method and cellular level blood cell models Several computational models of RBCs have been developed in the last two decades to simulate the dynamics of normal and diseased RBCs. Based on their level of complexity, these RBC models can be categorized into the protein-level RBC models [67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77], which are widely used in simulating the pathological alterations of RBC membrane structure in blood disorders, and cellular-level RBC models [72,[78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85], which are mostly used in modeling blood cell suspensions or blood flow. Due to the high computational cost of the protein-level RBC models, we employ a cellular-level model [86] developed based on dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) [87] to simulate the normal and sickle RBCs as well as macrophages (more details on the cellular-level models and the values of model parameters can be found in S1 Text).…”