A microscopic model for hydrated biological tissues

Abstract

The present work presents a density-functional microscopic model of soft biological tissue. The model was based on a prototype molecular structure from experimentally resolved collagen peptide residues and water clusters and has the objective to capture some well-known experimental features of soft tissues. It was obtained the optimized geometry, binding and coupling energies and dipole moments. The results concerning the stability of the confined water clusters, the water-water and water-collagen interactions within the CLBM framework were successfully correlated to some important trends observed experimentally in inflammatory tissues.