A particle-based computational model to analyse remodelling of the red blood cell cytoskeleton during malaria infections
Fig 5
Effects of network connectivity on shear response.
(A) Schematic representation for the network set-up. The yellow bars represent actin filaments and red circles indicate where an actin filament is missing. The black lines show the initialization positions of spectrin filaments. (B) Final configurations of the simulated networks at a shear of 1. The colors of the particles are the same as shown in Fig 2. (C) The stress-shear response is shown for networks with different connectivity. The black line corresponds to the perfect hexagonal network with six spectrins per node and the yellow line shows the response of a network with three spectrins per node. Additionally, some networks were simulated where four/six wholes where bridged with six/nine long spectrin filaments. (D) Here the effect of missing actins and spectrin filaments is analysed. Either only the actin nodes were taken away (-4/6 actins) or the whole hexagonal element including the spectrins (-4/6 hexagons). Again, this is compared to the perfect hexagonal lattice response in black.