On the mechanical modeling of cell components

Abstract

Eukaryotic cells are complex systems which carry out a variety of different tasks. The current contribution gives insight into the modeling of some of their vital components and represents an overview of results achieved within the international D‐A‐CH project on computational modeling of transport processes in a cell. The first part of the contribution studies viscoelastic effects of cross‐linked actin network embedded in cytosol. The basic‐model is used to simulate the actin behavior at a microscopic level. It considers the influence of the physical length, the end‐to‐end distance and the stretch modulus in order to provide a relationship between the stretch of a single polymer chain and the applied tension force. The effective behavior of the cell cytoplasm is simulated by using the multiscale finite element method. Here, a standard large strain viscous approach is applied for the cytosol, while the generalized Maxwell model simulates viscous effects occurring in filaments due to deviatoric changes. The examples dealing with combinations of tension‐holding tests give insight into the effective behavior of the cytoplasm.