Cells in vivo reside within complex microenvironments composed of both biochemical and biophysical cues. The dynamic feedback between cells and their microenvironments hinges upon biophysical cues that regulate critical cellular behaviors. Understanding this regulation from sensing to reaction to feedback is therefore critical, and a large effort is afoot to identify and mathematically model th...

The wall shear stress pattern was measured in a rigid plastic cast of a canine artery during steady flow by means of an electrochemical technique. The topographic distribution of shear stress is very nonuniform, with regions of high and low shear in close proximity. The steady shear stresses are highest at the leading edge of flow dividers and at the entrance regions to branch vessels. The shap...

A high frequency of nonhemolytic hereditary ovalocytosis in Malayan aborigines is thought to result from reduced susceptibility of affected individuals to malaria. Indeed, Kidson et al. recently showed that ovalocytes from Melanesians in Papua New Guinea are resistant to infection in culture by the malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum. In order to determine if protection against parasitic in...

Hydrogels are proving to be an excellent class of materials for biomedical applications. The molecular self-assembly of designed MAX1 β-hairpin peptides into fibrillar networks has emerged as a novel route to form responsive hydrogels. Herein, computational modeling techniques are used to investigate the relative arrangements of individual hairpins within the fibrils that constitute the gel. Th...

We present an experimental and computational investigation of time-varying flow in an idealized fully occluded 45 degrees distal end-to-side anastomosis. Two geometric configurations are assessed, one where the centerlines of host and bypass vessels lie within a plane, and one where the bypass vessel is deformed out of the plane of symmetry, respectively, termed planar and non-planar. Flow expe...

With the use of the cecal ligation and puncture model in mice, this study tested whether sepsis-induced decreased erythrocyte deformability is restricted to a subpopulation of cells. Erythrocyte subpopulations were isolated by centrifugal elutriation. Lineweaver-Burk conversion of deformability-response curves to shear stress was used to determine the shear stress at half-maximal cell elongatio...

Solitary waves in lattices, represented by homoclinic traveling wave trajectories of discrete dynamical systems, play a crucial role in many areas of science from condensed matter theory to biophysics [1]. In integrable systems solitary waves, known as solitons or quasiparticles, are understood rather thoroughly, with Toda lattice being the most prominent example that covers the whole range of ...

It has been known since Maxwell that collections of particles interacting via central forces only become rigid above the isostatic threshold, where the constraints and internal degrees of freedom just balance [1,2]. However, such networks can be stabilized below this threshold by additional interactions [3–5]. Here we elucidate the relative roles of bending versus central force interactions in ...

Observations show that plasma crystals, suspended in the sheath of a radio-frequency discharge, rotate under the influence of a vertical magnetic field. Depending on the discharge conditions, two different cases are observed: a rigid-body rotation (all the particles move with a constant angular velocity) and sheared rotation (the angular velocity of particles has a radial distribution). When th...