Reverse depletion effects and the determination of ligand density on some spherical bioparticles
Wang Ch., Lin Y., Fan Y., Liu Y., Li Q., Xu H.

Received: December 4, 2015

DOI: 10.7868/S0044451016060183

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In cell environments crowded with macromolecules, the depletion effects act and assist in the assembly of a wide range of cellular structures, from the cytoskeleton to the chromatin loop, which are well accepted. But a recent quantum dot experiment indicated that the dimensions of the receptor-ligand complex have strong effects on the size-dependent exclusion of proteins in cell environments. In this article, a continuum elastic model is constructed to resolve the competition between the dimension of the receptor-ligand complex and depletion effects in the endocytosis of a spherical virus-like bioparticle. Our results show that the depletion effects do not always assist endocytosis of a spherical virus-like bioparticle; while the dimension of the ligand-receptor complex is larger than the size of a small bioparticle in cell environments, the depletion effects do not work and reverse effects appear. The ligand density covered on the virus can be identified quantitatively.