Static and dynamic deformabilities of erythrocytes are important determinants of microcirculatory blood flow. To determine the influence of increased cellular hemoglobin concentration on these properties, we quantitated static and dynamic deformabilities of isolated subpopulations of oxygenated normal and sickle erythrocytes with defined cell densities using micromechanical manipulations of ind...

Microtubules are long, proteinaceous filaments that perform structural functions in eukaryotic cells by defining cellular shape and serving as tracks for intracellular motor proteins. We report the first accurate measurements of the flexural rigidity of microtubules. By analyzing the thermally driven fluctuations in their shape, we estimated the mean flexural rigidity of taxol-stabilized microt...

Microtubules are long, proteinaceous filaments that perform structural functions in eukaryotic cells by defining cellular shape and serving as tracks for intracellular motor proteins. We report the first accurate measurements of the flexural rigidity of microtubules. By analyzing the thermally driven fluctuations in their shape, we estimated the mean flexural rigidity of taxol-stabilized microt...

Microtubules are long, proteinaceous filaments that perform structural functions in eukaryotic cells by defining cellular shape and serving as tracks for intracellular motor proteins. We report the first accurate measurements of the flexural rigidity of microtubules. By analyzing the thermally driven fluctuations in their shape, we estimated the mean flexural rigidity of taxol-stabilized microt...

Micellar shape change in an amphiphilic solution is investigated by a molecular dynamics simulation of coarse-grained semiflexible amphiphilic molecules with explicit solvent molecules. Our simulations show that a cylindrical micelle is obtained at small molecular rigidity while a disc-shaped micelle appears at large molecular rigidity. We find that most chains are in an extended conformation a...

The force needed to buckle a thin elastic surface is proportional to its bending rigidity. This fact suggests using a buckling setup to measure the bending modulus of lipid membranes. Extending the work of Noguchi [Phys. Rev. E 83, 061919 (2011)], we systematically derive highly accurate analytical expressions for the forces along and perpendicular to the buckle, and we elucidate some of their ...

The adhesion of fluid vesicles at chemically structured substrates is studied theoretically via Monte Carlo simulations. The substrate surface is planar and repels the vesicle membrane apart from a single surface domain gamma , which strongly attracts this membrane. If the vesicle is larger than the attractive gamma domain, the spreading of the vesicle onto the substrate is restricted by the si...

We use an elastic rod model with contact to study the extension versus rotation diagrams of single supercoiled DNA molecules. We reproduce quantitatively the supercoiling response of overtwisted DNA and, using experimental data, we get an estimation of the effective supercoiling radius and of the twist rigidity of B-DNA. We find that unlike the bending rigidity, the twist rigidity of DNA seems ...

Several strategies for controlling microtubule patterns are developed because of the rigidity determined from the molecular structure and the geometrical structure. In contrast to the patterns in co-operation with motor proteins or associated proteins, microtubules have a huge potential for patterns via their intrinsic flexural rigidity. We discover that a microtubule teardrop pattern emerges v...

Some time ago Salmhofer demonstrated the equivalence of the strong coupling lattice Schwinger model withWilson fermions to a certain 8-vertex model which can be understood as a self-avoiding loop model on the square lattice with bending rigidity η = 1/2 and monomer weight z = (2κ)−2. The present paper applies two approximate analytical methods to the investigation of critical properties of the ...