Abstract
We present a comprehensive theoretical-experimental framework for quantitative, high-throughput study of cell biomechanics. An improved electrodeformation method has been developed by combing dielectrophoresis and amplitude shift keying, a form of amplitude modulation. This method offers a potential to fully control the magnitude and rate of deformation in cell membranes. In healthy human red blood cells, nonlinear viscoelasticity of cell membranes is obtained through variable amplitude load testing. A mathematical model to predict cellular deformations is validated using the experimental results of healthy human red blood cells subjected to various types of loading. These results demonstrate new capabilities of the electrodeformation technique and the validated mathematical model to explore the effects of different loading configurations on the cellular mechanical behavior. This gives it more advantages over existing methods and can be further developed to study the effects of strain rate and loading waveform on the mechanical properties of biological cells in health and disease.
Highlights
Red blood cell (RBC, or erythrocyte) plays an important role to transport oxygen to tissues and organs and carry carbon dioxide back to lungs
Passive shear flow[8] and dielectrophoresis (DEP)[17,18,19] are the two main mechanisms implemented in microfluidics for characterizing cell biomechanics and blood rheology
Most of the existing work on DEP force calibration is based on approximated mathematical models, such as effective dipole moment (EDM) method and spherical cell model[27]
Summary
Red blood cell (RBC, or erythrocyte) plays an important role to transport oxygen to tissues and organs and carry carbon dioxide back to lungs. DEP force from Maxwell-Wagner type polarization[20] exerted on a cell is along with the field lines and its magnitude is determined by the relative polarizability of the cell and the surrounding medium, electrical field strength, cell shape and size[21] This effect has been utilized to study electrodeformation of single cells, such as RBCs22,23, mammalian cells[24], plant protoplasts[25], and cervical cancer cells[26]. For cells with comparable size to the electrodes or when cells move to the vicinity of the electrodes, cellular influence on the distribution of electrical field is no longer negligible In such case, Maxwell stress tensor (MST) method can be used to calculate the electrical forces exerted on deformed cells with improved accuracy[28,29]. The nonlinear shear elasticity and viscosity of healthy RBCs were found to be dependent on the deformation ratio of the cells and can be well fitted with an exponential function for large deformations[40]
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