Packing Architecture and Mechanical Behaviors of Flexible Filaments Confined in Vesicles

The mechanical interplay between flexible nanofibers and vesicles, is of essential importance not only to the investigation of various cell activities, such as cell shape control cell division and cell movement, but also to the applications on biomedical engineering including drug delivery system and biomedical imaging, as well as nanomaterial hazard prevention. Here we present our recent theoretical work on how packing architectures and mechanical behaviors of confined flexible nanofibers in vesicles are regulated by the the filament length and rigidities. In the case of a single open filament in vesicle, characteristic vesicle configurations such as cherrylike, lemonlike and dropletlike shapes are observed as filaments become more flexible. In the case of a single closed filaments, stiff and short filaments adopt planar shapes such as circles and ellipses, while soft and long filaments exhibit large deformation and adopt tennis seamline and eightlike configurations. Corresponding morphological phase diagrams are determined.