Measurement of erythrocyte membrane elasticity by flicker eigenmode decomposition

We have studied the flickering of erythrocytes at wavelengths comparable to the cell dimension. To do this we have analyzed the edge fluctuations of the cell to a resolution of 5 nm by combining phase contrast microscopy with fast image processing. By measuring the edge excitations simultaneously at four orthogonal positions around the cell, the eigenmodes of equal azimuthal mode numbers m = 0,1,2 could be separated. From a continuous time sequence of 100 s of video frames taken at 40 ms time intervals, we determined the time-auto correlation function for the modes m = 0,1,2 and calculated their mean square amplitudes as well as their decay times tau m. To explain the results we also present the theoretically calculated energy eigenmodes of an erythrocyte, accounting for the constraint that the cell is in contact with the substrate along an annular ring, which agreed well with the experimental findings. We found that the softest mode is a "hindered translational" mode with m = 1 of the adhered cell, which is almost insensitive to the shear elastic modulus. Comparison of the calculated and measured amplitudes yielded an average value for the bending stiffness of kc = 4 x 10(-19) J, which is much larger than the value obtained by flicker analysis at short wavelengths (kc = 2.3 x 10(-20) J). It would, however, agree well with the value expected from the red cell membrane area compressibility modulus of K = 4.5 x 10(-1)N/m, which corresponds to a lipid bilayer containing approximately 50 mol % of cholesterol. In contradiction to our theoretical expectations we found that the flicker eigenmodes seemed not to be influenced by the membrane shear elasticity, which will be discussed in terms of an unusual coupling between the lipid bilayer and the cytoskeleton.