Abstract
We study the shapes of human red blood cells using continuum mechanics. In particular, we model the crenated, echinocytic shapes and show how they may arise from a competition between the bending energy of the plasma membrane and the stretching/shear elastic energies of the membrane skeleton. In contrast to earlier work, we calculate spicule shapes exactly by solving the equations of continuum mechanics subject to appropriate boundary conditions. A simple scaling analysis of this competition reveals an elastic length Λ el, which sets the length scale for the spicules and is, thus, related to the number of spicules experimentally observed on the fully developed echinocyte.
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