Fig. 2.
Upper: successive snapshots of the sickle cell membrane in the different development stages of the intracellular aligned hemoglobin polymer domain with “linear” growth in the x-direction. The left sketch demonstrates the coarse-grained model for the aligned hemoglobin polymer domain development: free sickle hemoglobin monomers (green color), represented by the DPD particles, can potentially join with the pre-existing polymers (red color) with the probability defined by the equation of probability, Pt. A linear polymer configuration is adopted in the current case to represent the specific growth direction. Different polymer configurations are adopted to represent the various aligned hemoglobin polymer domains, as shown in Fig. 3 and 4. Lower: successive snapshots of the sickle cell with the growing aligned hemoglobin polymer domain deflected in the z-direction (normal to the cell), resulting in the classical “sickle” shape.