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. 2021 Jul 29;11:15477. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-94735-y

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© The Author(s) 2021

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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The deformation of the CTC as a function of the number of attached platelets and the force distribution on the membrane of the CTC. (a) Evolution of the aspect ratio with time shows the deformation of CTCs over the simulation time for different numbers of attached platelets. The aspect ratio is calculated using $ς = \frac{L - B}{L + B}$ . Also, the firm adhesion instance is indicated with grey diamond for the cases in which there are attached platelets and the firm adhesion occurs. The graph shows that the attached platelets can reduce the aspect ratio (i.e. deformations) of the CTC with no attached platelet to less than half when 15 platelets are attached to the CTC. Attached platelets can preserve the integrity of the CTC and reduce the deformations of the CTC by making the force distribution on the CTC membrane homogeneous; (b) Front view (on the left side) and bottom view (on the right side) of the CTC showing its shape deformation in the rolling motion (for the CTC with no attached platelets, top) and in firm adhesion state (for CTCs with 5, 10, and 15 attached platelets). The membrane is coloured with the distribution of the magnitude of the total force on the CTC. External forces applied on small areas of CTC membrane can damage the CTC during the adhesion process. Platelets attachment to the CTC reduces the maximum force applied to the CTC by making the force distribution on CTC increasingly homogeneous.