Continuum- and Particle-Based Modeling of Human Red Blood Cells

Scale-invariance in miniature coarse-grained red blood cells by fluctuation analysis

“…The red blood cell (RBC) is the simplest and most well researched blood-borne cell, making it an ideal candidate on which to develop techniques in whole-cell computational modelling. 1–3 It is a highly deformable, “rubbery” cell, able to recover its shape after squeezing through very narrow capillaries. 4 The RBC is primarily comprised of a 2-component membrane, enclosing a cytoplasm fluid interior.…”

“…To date, the most popular have been those most computationally efficient, namely continuum methods such as the finite element method (FEM), and the aggressively coarse-grained (CG), dissipative-particle-dynamics (DPD). 2,3,26 However, with the ever increasing power of High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities, CG models of higher resolution and complexity have seen increasing popularity; notably the coarse-grained-molecular-dynamics (CGMD) RBC model developed successively by Drouffe et al , 27 Yuan et al 28 and Fu et al 29 In this CGMD formalism, the molecules comprising the bilayer, cytoskeleton and transmembrane proteins are explicitly represented as CG particles that interact through Lennard-Jones-like potentials and Hookean bindings. To give meaningful separation between the two distinct membrane components, the length-scale of the system is defined by the thickness of the cell bilayer (5 nm).…”