Flat and sigmoidally curved contact zones in vesicle–vesicle adhesion
- 16 January 2007
- journal article
- Published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Vol. 104 (3), 761-765
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0607633104
Abstract
Using the membrane-bending elasticity theory and a simple effective model of adhesion, we study the morphology of lipid vesicle doublets. In the weak adhesion regime, we find flat-contact axisymmetric doublets, whereas at large adhesion strengths, the vesicle aggregates are nonaxisymmetric and characterized by a sigmoidally curved, S-shaped contact zone with a single invagination and a complementary evagination on each vesicle. The sigmoid-contact doublets agree very well with the experimentally observed shapes of erythrocyte aggregates. Our results show that in identical vesicles with large to moderate surface-to-volume ratio, the sigmoid-contact shape is the only bound morphology. We also discuss the role of sigmoid contacts in the formation of multicellular aggregates such as erythrocyte rouleaux.This publication has 40 references indexed in Scilit:
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