Vesiculation of healthy and defective red blood cells

He Li and George Lykotrafitis
Phys. Rev. E 92, 012715 – Published 21 July 2015

Abstract

Vesiculation of mature red blood cells (RBCs) contributes to removal of defective patches of the erythrocyte membrane. In blood disorders, which are related to defects in proteins of the RBC membrane, vesiculation of the plasma membrane is intensified. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain RBC vesiculation but the exact underlying mechanisms and what determines the sizes of the vesicles are still not completely understood. In this work, we apply a two-component coarse-grained molecular dynamics RBC membrane model to study how RBC vesiculation is controlled by the membrane spontaneous curvature and by lateral compression of the membrane. Our simulation results show that the formation of small homogeneous vesicles with a diameter less than 40 nm can be attributed to a large spontaneous curvature of membrane domains. On the other hand, compression on the membrane can cause the formation of vesicles with heterogeneous composition and with sizes comparable with the size of the cytoskeleton corral. When spontaneous curvature and lateral compression are simultaneously considered, the compression on the membrane tends to facilitate formation of vesicles originating from curved membrane domains. We also simulate vesiculation of RBCs with membrane defects connected to hereditary elliptocytosis (HE) and to hereditary spherocytosis (HS). When the vertical connectivity between the lipid bilayer and the membrane skeleton is elevated, as in normal RBCs, multiple vesicles are shed from the compressed membrane with diameters similar to the cytoskeleton corral size. In HS RBCs, where the connectivity between the lipid bilayer and the cytoskeleton is reduced, larger-size vesicles are released under the same compression ratio as in normal RBCs. Lastly, we find that vesicles released from HE RBCs can contain cytoskeletal filaments due to fragmentation of the membrane skeleton while vesicles released from the HS RBCs are depleted of cytoskeletal filaments.

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  • Received 10 March 2015
  • Revised 27 May 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.92.012715

©2015 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

He Li and George Lykotrafitis*

  • Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, USA

  • *Present address: Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Connecticut, 191 Auditorium Road, Unit 3139, Storrs, CT 06269-3139, USA; gelyko@engr.uconn.edu

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Vol. 92, Iss. 1 — July 2015

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