Elastic Thickness Compressibilty of the Red Cell Membrane

AbstractWe have used an ultrasensitive force probe and optical interferometry to examine the thickness compressibility of the red cell membrane in situ. Pushed into the centers of washed-white red cell ghosts lying on a coverglass, the height of the microsphere-probe tip relative to its closest approach on the adjacent glass surface revealed the apparent material thickness, which began at ∼90nm per membrane upon detection of contact (force ∼1–2pN). With further impingement, the apparent thickness per membrane diminished over a soft compliant regime that spanned ∼40nm and stiffened on approach to ∼50nm under forces of ∼100 pN. The same force-thickness response was obtained on recompression after retraction of the probe, which demonstrated elastic recoverability. Scaled by circumferences of the microspheres, the forces yielded energies of compression per area which exhibited an inverse distance dependence resembling that expected for flexible polymers. Attributed to the spectrin component of the membrane cytoskeleton, the energy density only reached one thermal energy unit (kBT) per spectrin tetramer near maximum compression. Hence, we hypothesized that the soft compliant regime probed in the experiments represented the compressibility of the outer region of spectrin loops and that the stiff regime