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Soft Matter Modeling of Biological Cells

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Advances in Soft Matter Mechanics

Abstract

In this work, we review some of our recent work on developments of soft matter models for cells to study the focal adhesion of endothelial cells as well as stem cells, in an attempt to explain mechanical information exchange between the cells and their extracellular environment. Particularly, we model the macroscale endothelial cell as a hyperelastic medium, and the stem cell as a liquid crystal elastomer. A nanoscale adhesive model is introduced to describe the interaction between receptors and ligands. We have developed and implemented a Lagrange type meshfree Galerkin formulation and related computational algorithms for the proposed cell and adhesive contact model. A comparison study with experimental data has been conducted to validate the parameters of the cell model. By using the soft matter cell model, we have simulated the soft adhesive contact process between cells and extracellular substrate. The soft matter cell model presented in this work is a primitive one, but it may have provided a useful approach for more realistic and more accurate modeling of cells, especially stem cells.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

    Xiaowei Zeng, Shaofan Li & Bo Ren

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  1. Xiaowei Zeng
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  2. Shaofan Li
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  3. Bo Ren
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© 2012 Higher Education Press, Beijing and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Zeng, X., Li, S., Ren, B. (2012). Soft Matter Modeling of Biological Cells. In: Advances in Soft Matter Mechanics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19373-6_3

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