Fig. 6.1.

Here we exhibit the equilibrium shapes adopted by a cell membrane assumed to have an initial shape of a 3×1×1 ellipsoid shown at the left. The figure in the center is the typical biconcave shape adopted by a membrane in the absence of cortical forces. At the right we can see the asymmetric final shape that is adopted when the membrane is under a linear tension gradient, going from 10pN/µm² in the back to 0 pN/µm² in the front. The numerical method used to produce these shapes is based heavily on that of (Bonito et al. 2010). The computations were performed using the finite element software FELICITY due to Walker (2017).