Computational study of cell adhesion and rolling in flow channel by meshfree method

Abstract

Tethering and rolling of circulating leukocytes on the surface of endothelium are critical steps during an inflammatory response. A soft solid cell model was proposed to study monocytes tethering and rolling behaviors on substrate surface in shear flow. The interactions between monocytes and micro-channel surface were modeled by a coarse-grained molecular adhesive potential. The computational model was implemented in a Lagrange-type meshfree Galerkin formulation to investigate the monocyte tethering and rolling process with different flow rates. From the simulation results, it was found that the flow rate has profound effects on the rolling velocity, contact area and effective stress of monocytes. As the flow rate increased, the rolling velocity would increase linearly, whereas the contact area and average effective stress in monocyte showed nonlinear increase.

Keywords:

• Cell tethering
• cell rolling
• meshfree method
• human monocyte
• shear flow
• numerical simulation

Acknowledgements

Valuable discussions with Dr Anand Ramasubramanian and Dr Amit Kumar Saha at Biomedical Engineering of the University of Texas at San Antonio, Dr Jean Jiang at Biochemistry Department of University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio are gratefully acknowledged.