A particle-based model for healthy and malaria-infected red blood cells
报告人：Prof. James J. Feng
Department of Mathematics University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
时间：5月31日下午3:00
地点：力学一楼239（多媒体教室）
摘要:
In this talk, I will describe a smoothed particle hydrodynamics method for simulating the motion and deformation of red blood cells. After validating the model and numerical method using the dynamics of healthy red cells in shear and channel flows, we focus on the loss of red cell deformability as a result of malaria infection. The current understanding ascribes the loss of RBC deformability to a 10-fold increase in membrane stiffness caused by extra cross-linking in the spectrin network. Local measurements by
micropipette aspiration, however, have reported only an increase of about 3-fold in the shear modulus. We believe the discrepancy stems from the rigid parasite particles inside infected cells, and have carried out 3D numerical simulations of RBC stretching tests by optical tweezers to demonstrate this mechanism.
Our results show that the presence of a sizeable parasite greatly reduces the ability of RBCs to deform under stretching. Thus, the previous interpretation of RBC-deformation data in terms of membrane stiffness alone is flawed. With the solid inclusion, the apparently contradictory data can be reconciled, and the observed loss of deformability can be predicted quantitatively using the local membrane elasticity measured by micropipettes.
报告人简介：2008- University of British Columbia, Professor
2004-2008 University of British Columbia, Associate Professor
1998-2003 Levich Institute, City College of CUNY, Associate Professor
1995-1998 University of California, Santa Barbara, Postdoc Researcher
欢迎感兴趣师生参加！