Morphology of depletant-induced erythrocyte aggregates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Red blood cells suspended in quiescent plasma tend to aggregate into multicellular assemblages, including linearly stacked columnar rouleaux, which can reversibly form more complex clusters or branching networks. While these aggregates play an essential role in establishing hemorheological and pathological properties, the biophysics behind their self-assembly into dynamic mesoscopic structures remains under-explored. We employ coarse-grained molecular simulations to model low-hematocrit erythrocytes subject to short-range implicit depletion forces, and demonstrate not only that depletion interactions are sufficient to account for a sudden dispersion-aggregate transition, but also that the volume fraction of depletant macromolecules controls small aggregate morphology. We observe a sudden transition from a dispersion to a linear column rouleau, followed by a slow emergence of disorderly amorphous clusters of many short rouleaux at larger volume fractions. This work demonstrates how discocyte topology and short-range, non-specific, physical interactions are sufficient to self-assemble erythrocytes into various aggregate structures, with markedly different morphologies and biomedical consequences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".