I assume during cell division or ex/endocytosis, membrane tension will be much larger than normal the value of 0.01~0.1mN/m, because essentially membrane needs to be broken in those processes. But I can't find any references for my assumption, is anyone aware of experiments that measure/estimate large tension values during biological processes?
I will suggest to look two papers :
1. A Classic paper on tension of membranes : Morris and Hoffman , Journal of Membrane Biology (2001) . They speak of a lytic tension to be ~ 1-10 mn/m
2. A recent review article that explains that membrane tension originates from 2 contibutions - Intrinsic Plasma membrane tension and Cortex contribution due to shear modulus. IMHO, no one really knows what is the contribution from each but definitely this is something worthy of researching. There have been experiments in Curie Institute where they have looked at both RBC and living cells ( pulled tethers or observed fluctuations in membrane; See work by Francois Brochard and Timo Betz ) and also work done on similar topics at Cambridge (Pietra Cicutta) to quantify the tensions to be as you mention in the range of few mn/M. But ofcourse in lytic cells or growth cells the situations can be more complex and the whole idea of a "Membrane tension value" may be wrong - to start with . Hence one must think that cells during such processes are actively remodelling the cortex underlying and therefore a continumm description of a an elastic surface with well defined curvature-elastic parameters is not obvious. Ofccourse this means more avenues to do reasearch experimentally to quantify the terms and also theoretical model which in conjunction shall enable us to understand the "Role of Cytoskeleton".
The review article is from Dan Fletcher's group in Berkeley : Munoz and FLetcher , 2013 , Trends in Cell Biology
I think if you consider the contribution of CSK, the value may be pracitcal. For this, early papers dealing the rheological may be helpful, although they were not measuring the tensions. These model include the Newtonian interior or Maxwell interior with a cortical shell. These model all evaluated the cortical tensions based on experiments.
1) E. Evans and A. Yeung, Apparent viscosity and cortical tension of blood granulocytes determined by micropipette aspiration, Biophys. J. 56 (1989), 151–160.
2) A. Yeung and E. Evans, Cortical shell-liquid core model for passive flow of liquid-like spherical cells into micropipettes, Biophys. J. 56 (1989), 139–149.
3) C. Dong, R. Skalak and K.-L.P. Sung, Cytoplasmic rheology of passive neutrophils, Biorheology 28 (1991), 557–567.
4) C. Dong, R. Skalak, K.-L.P. Sung, G.W. Schmid-Schönbein and S. Chien, Passive deformation analysis of human leukocytes, J. Biomech. Eng. 110 (1988), 27–36.
5) R. Skalak, C. Dong and C. Zhu, Passive deformation and active motions of leukocytes, J. Biomech. Eng. 112 (1990), 295–301.
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