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Two-component Dissipative Particle Dynamics Model of Red Blood Cell Membranes

ZHANGLI PENG, XUEJIN LI, IGOR PIVKIN, GEORGE KARNIADAKIS

Abstract


By modeling the lipid bilayer and the cytoskeleton as two distinct layers, we developed a two-layer whole cell dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) model of erythrocyte membranes to investigate quasi-static, thermal and dynamic problems. First, we validated our two-layer DPD model by simulating the membrane thermal fluctuations of healthy and malaria-infected erythrocytes. We found that the bilayer-skeletal interaction plays a significant role and the two-layer DPD model matches the experiment better than the one-layer DPD model. In addition, by simulating the bilayer-skeletal detachment in a flow channel experiment, we predicted the interaction strength at the molecular level.

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