The effect of cell shape on local hydrodynamic environment

Cell adhesion is very important for various biological phenomena in blood flow. Cells would deform to resist the hydrodynamic forces on the blood vessel wall, which results in local flow environment change due to the disturbance of adherent cells. In this paper, computational fluid dynamics simulations were performed to investigate the effect of cell shape on local hydrodynamic environment in details. We found that under a flow condition 73 μl/min, cell shape would more affect the flow in one cell height region. Moreover, cell length, the position of cell top and cell shape curvature may also affect the local hydrodynamic environment as well as the drag forces differently.