Seminars & Colloquia Calendar

While blood clot formation has been relatively well studied, little is known about the mechanisms underlying the subsequent structural and mechanical clot remodeling called contraction or retraction. Impairment of the clot contraction process is associated with both life-threatening bleeding and thrombotic conditions, such as ischemic stroke, venous thromboembolism, and others. Recently, blood clot contraction was observed to be hindered in patients with COVID-19. First, a novel multi-phase model of blood clot embolization will be described and discussed. Then, a novel three-dimensional multi-scale model will be described and applied to quantify biomechanical mechanisms of the kinetics of clot deformation and contraction driven by platelet filopodia-fibrin fiber pulling interactions. These results provide novel biological insights since filopodia have been thought of previously as performing mostly a sensory function. The biomechanical mechanisms and modeling approach to be described can potentially apply to studying other blood clotting processes as well as to other systems in which cells are embedded in a filamentous network and exert forces on the extracellular matrix modulated by the substrate stiffness.

Samuel Britton, Oleg Kim, Francesco Pancaldi, Zhiliang Xu, Rustem I. Litvinov, John W.Weisel, Mark Alber [2019], Contribution of nascent cohesive fiber-fiber interactions to the non-linear elasticity of fibrin networks under tensile load, Acta Biomaterialia 94, 514-523.

Shixin Xu, Zhiliang Xu, Oleg Kim, Rustem I. Litvinov, John W. Weisel and Mark Alber [2017], Model Predictions of Deformation, Embolization, and Permeability of Partially Obstructive Blood Clots under Variable Shear Flow, Journal of the Royal Society Interface 14: 20170441.

25. Oleg V. Kim, Rustem I. Litvinov, Mark S. Alber and John W. Weisel [2017], Quantitative Structural Mechanobiology of Platelet-Driven Blood Clot Contraction, Nature Communications 8: 1274.