Issue 2, 2020

Confined filaments in soft vesicles – the case of sickle red blood cells

Abstract

Abnormal shapes of red blood cells (RBC) have been associated with various diseases. Diverse RBC shapes have also been intriguing for membrane biophysics. Here we focus on sickle shaped RBC which form due to abnormal growth of semi-rigid hemoglobin (HbS) fibers confined in RBC. Using the area difference elasticity (ADE) model for RBC and worm-like chain model for the confined HbS fibers, we explore shape deformations at equilibrium using Monte-Carlo simulations. We show that while a single HbS fiber is not rigid enough to produce sickle like deformation, a fiber bundle can do so. We also consider multiple disjoint filaments and find that confinement can generate multipolar RBC shapes and can even promote helical filament conformations which have not been discussed before. We show that the same model, when applied to microtubules confined in phospholipid vesicles, predicts vesicle tubulation. In addition we reproduce the tube collapse transition and tennis racket type vesicle shapes, as reported in experiments. We conclude that with a decrease in the surface area to volume ratio, and membrane rigidity, the vesicles prefer tubulation over sickling. The highlight of this work is several important non-axisymmetric RBC and vesicle shapes, which have never been explored in simulations.

Graphical abstract: Confined filaments in soft vesicles – the case of sickle red blood cells

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
16 Sep 2019
Accepted
20 Nov 2019
First published
21 Nov 2019

Soft Matter, 2020,16, 421-427

Confined filaments in soft vesicles – the case of sickle red blood cells

A. Behera, G. Kumar and A. Sain, Soft Matter, 2020, 16, 421 DOI: 10.1039/C9SM01872G

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements