Modeling the Excess Cell Surface Stored in a Complex Morphology of Bleb-Like Protrusions
Fig 5
Schematic for the phase field formulation of a cell in an aqueous medium.
ϕ1, ϕ2, ϕ3, represent volume fractions of the external aqueous medium, the nematic cortex as schematically depicted by the cross-hatched region and the cytosol, respectively, with ϕ1+ϕ2+ϕ3 = 1. The entire computational domain is denoted as Ω. The cell surface is defined by the level sets ϕ1 = ϕ2 = 0.5, while the cortex-cytosol interface is defined by ϕ2 = ϕ3 = 0.5. Note that we penalize coexistence of three phases.