What is it about?
A major function of the spleen is to filter aged and diseased red blood cells, but how exactly the biconcave red cells pass through the gaps between endothelial cells in the spleen is unknown. We developed biomimetic microfluidics and computational simulations to real the physical mechanisms of this process.
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Why is it important?
Splenic filtration of red cells through narrow interendothelial slits remains poorly understood despite its physiological significance as experiments of red cells passing through the slits are lacking. Here, we coupled live imaging, biomimetic submicron-fluidics, and multiscale modeling to quantify passage conditions. Remarkably, healthy 8- m cells can pass through 0.28- m slits at body temperature. This event is conditioned to cells being able to deform into two tether-connected equal spheres and, in limiting cases, to unfold their spectrin cytoskeleton.
Perspectives
I started to work with my French collaborators Annie Viallat and Emmanuèle Helfer when I was a postdoc at Subra Suresh and Ming Dao's group at MIT. It was a really long but exciting journey with constant refining of the experiments and simulations. I am grateful to have such a good and long-term collaboration, and also grateful for the supports and inspirations from Professor Suresh and Dr. Dao at MIT.”
Zhangli Peng
University of Illinois at Chicago
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Physical mechanisms of red blood cell splenic filtration, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2300095120.
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