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

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.