MICRO-CONSTITUENT BASED VISCOELASTIC FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF BIOLOGICAL CELLS

A viscoelastic analysis of the biological cell considering the microcellular material properties is carried out in this work. Three separate regions of the cell: the actin cortex, cytoplasm and nucleus are considered. The outer cortex and cytoplasm are modeled using standard linear viscoelastic model (SLS) and standard neo-Hookean viscoelastic solid, and a linear elastic material model is considered for the nucleus. The effect of the material properties of cytoplasm and actin cortex on the derivable parameters from three major experimental studies of magnetic twisting cytometry (MTC) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) and micropipette aspiration (MPA) are analyzed using the finite element method. The bead center displacement for the MTC, reaction force for AFM, and aspiration length ratio for the MPA are the major quantities derived from the finite element analysis. A number of parametric studies are also conducted and it is observed that SLS and SnHS models predict nearly identical results for the material constants.