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. 2014 Sep 20;13:375. doi: 10.1186/1475-2875-13-375

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© Geislinger et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Schematic drawing of the different regimes of motion exhibited by RBCs in shear flow. (a) Tumbling at low shear stresses. The cell does not deform and rotates like a rigid body with a and b indicating the projection of the elliptical half axes in the paper plane. (b) At higher shear stress, the cell reorients itself and adopts the rolling motion. In this state of motion, the entire cell rotates. (c) At even higher shear stress, the RBCs reorient again and adopt the tank-treading state of motion. The cell is stretched and has a constant inclination angle θ with respect to the flow while the membrane rotates around the cytoplasm.