Mechanical response of human red blood cells in health and disease: Some structure-property-function relationships
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Mechanical response of human red blood cells in health and disease: Some structure-property-function relationships S. Suresha) Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Division of Biological Engineering, and Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139-4307 (Received 28 March 2006; accepted 19 May 2006)
Aspects of mechanical deformability and biorheology of the human red blood cell are known to play a pivotal role in influencing organ function as well as states of overall health and disease. In this article, consequences of alterations to the membrane and cytoskeletal molecular structure of the human red blood cell are considered in the context of an infectious disease, Plasmodium falciparum malaria, and several hereditary hemolytic disorders: spherocytosis, elliptocytosis, and sickle cell anemia. In each of these cases, the effects of altered cell shape or molecular structure on cell elasticity, motility, and biorheology are examined. These examples are used to gain broad perspectives on the connections among cell and subcellular structure, properties, and disease at the intersections of engineering, biology, and medicine.
I. INTRODUCTION
As an area of scientific and technological pursuit, “Materials Science and Engineering” has traditionally encompassed broad intellectual activities that probe the connections among the processing, micro/nanostructure, properties, and performance of engineered materials. This sphere of activities has long involved such disciplines as solid state physics, chemistry, applied mathematics, and essentially all aspects of engineering and technology. In recent years, the rapid expansion in the scope of traditional subspecialties of materials science and engineering has led to greater incorporation of such themes as experimental and computational biology, biophysics, biochemistry, biomedical engineering, medicine, and genomics in the context of natural and synthetic biomaterials and their functions within the human body. With advances in nanotechnology, the ability to probe the structural features and the size dependence of various properties of engineered and biological materials down to size scales finer than a nanometer has led to unprecedented opportunities for scientific investigations at the intersections of engineering, biology, and medicine. Concomitant with this development, recent advances in computer hardware and software have led to ever-improving sophistication in the computational modeling of the structure and properties at multiple length scales. These a)
Address all correspondence to this author. e-mail: [email protected] DOI: 10.1557/JMR.2006.0260 J. Mater. Res., Vol. 21, No. 8, Aug 2006
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developments, along with substantial progress in bioimaging and genomics, have collectively provided new capabilities for the study of biological cells and molecules. A particular topic of expanding research interest in this broad area involve
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