Much like a tightly wound drum, red blood cells are in perpetual vibration.
Vibrations help the cells maintain their flattened oval or disc shape, which is critical to their ability to deform as they traverse blood vessels in the body to deliver oxygen to tissues.
Understanding the vibrations could help develop treatments for malaria, sickle cell anemia and spherocytosis.
The vibrations are nearly impossible to study because their amplitude is so tiny (nanometer, or billionth of a meter, scale), and they occur in just milliseconds.