Elasticity erythrocyte membranes

The membrane skeleton acts as an elastic semisolid, allowing brief periods of deformation followed by reestablishment of the original cell shape (reviewed by Bennett and Gilligan, 1993). Erythrocytes in the human bloodstream have to squeeze repeatedly through narrow capillaries of diameters smaller than their own dimensions while resisting rupture. A functional erythrocyte membrane is pivotal to maintaining the functional properties of the erythrocyte. This importance is apparent when examination is made of many hemolytic anemias, where mutation of proteins involved in the structure of the submembranous cytoskeleton, and its attachment to the lipid bilayer, result in a malformed or altered cytoskeletal architecture and a disease phenotype. 

Strey, H., Peterson, M. and Sackmann, E. (1995) Measurement of erythrocyte membrane elasticity by flicker eigenmode decomposition. Biophysical Journal, 69, 478-88. 

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A wide variety of shape transformations of fluid membranes has been extensively studied theoretically in the past two decades using a bending elasticity model proposed by Canham and Helfrich [1]. The model has succeeded in explaining equilibrium shapes of the erythrocyte. However, much attention has recently been paid to shape deformations induced by internal degrees of freedom of membranes. For example, the bending elasticity model cannot explain the deformation from the biconcave shape of the erythrocyte to the crenated one (echinocytosis) [2, 3]. It is pointed out [3] that a local asymmetry in the composition between two halves of the bilayer plays an important role in the crenated shape. It has been observed [4] that a lateral phase separation occurs on an artificial two-component membrane where domains prefer local curvatures depending on the composition. In order to study the shape deformation accompanied by the intramembrane phase separation, we consider a two-component membrane as the simplest case of real biomembranes composed of several kinds of amphiphiles. 

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