037

Title:

Mechanics of Human Red Blood Cell at the Onset and Progression Stages of Plasmodium Falciparum Malaria Parasite

Discipline: Biomedical Engineering

Presenter:

Mohamed Eraky

Abstract:

Malaria induced by plasmodium falciparum (pf) genus is one of the life-threatening infections for human Red Blood Cell (RBC). During the erythrocytic developmental stages of the parasite namely; Ring, Trophozoite and Schizont, RBC undergoes continuous intracellular cytoskeletal rearrangement and thereby leads to progressive global changes in its respective mechanical properties. Previous efforts used in-vitro stretching tests and computational simulations to obtain continuous force-displacement curves for different stages of infection and reported a 10-fold increase in the average shear modulus of the infected RBC. Although their results provided good insights into the axial-deformation of infected cells, the computed transverse diameter did not show similar agreement with the experimental measurements. In the present work, a novel computational model is presented, where the cell membrane is decomposed into infected and quasi-normal segments to mimic the infection progressions with different shear modulus. The cell membrane is modelled using the hyperelastic Skalak constitutive model within the framework of a fully three-dimensional finite element analysis. In the advanced Schizont stage, a uniform shear modulus is used, whereas in the other two stages, sizable circular patches with diameters 2.4 and 4μm, respectively are used to replicate the infected segments. Simulation results indicate an 8-fold increase in the shear modulus of the Schizont stage. Interestingly, for intermediate stages of infection, the average shear modulus is found to increase linearly with the percent area-infection which introduces a potential application of the model to predict the mechanical properties of infected RBC throughout intracellular cycle of the parasite.

Author(s):

Mohamed T. Eraky, Ahmed I. Abd El-Rahman, Mostafa H. Shazly, Mohamed M. Abdelrahman

Funding Acknowledgements:

This research was not funded