BPCPPDYSOE21 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 20: Focus Biological Cells in Microfluidics I
BP 20.3: Talk
Tuesday, March 23, 2021, 12:40–13:00, BPc
High Throughput Microfluidic Characterization of Erythrocyte Shapes and Mechanical Variability — •Felix Reichel1,2, Johannes Mauer3, Ahsan Nawaz1, Gerhard Gompper3, Jochen Guck1, and Dmitry Fedosov3 — 1Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin, Erlangen — 2Biotechnology Center, Center for Molecular and Cellular Bioengineering, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden — 3Theoretical Soft Matter and Biophysics, Institute of Complex Systems and Institute for Advanced Simulation, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich
The circulation of red blood cells (RBCs) in microchannels is important in microvascular blood flow and biomedical applications such as blood analysis in microfluidics. Current understanding of the complexity of RBC shapes and dynamical changes in microchannels is mainly formed by a number of simulation studies, but there are few systematic experimental investigations. Here, we present a first systematical mapping of experimental RBC shapes and dynamics for a wide range of flow rates and channel sizes. Results are compared with simulations and show good agreement. A key difference to simulations is that in experiments there is no single well-defined RBC state for fixed flow conditions, but rather a distribution of states. This result can be attributed to the inherent variability in RBC mechanical properties, which is confirmed by a model that takes the variation in RBC shear elasticity into account. These results make a significant step toward a quantitative connection between RBC behavior in microfluidic devices and their mechanical properties.