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In case of vessel wall damage or contact of blood plasma with a foreign surface, the chain of chemical reactions called coagulation cascade is launched that leading to the formation of a fibrin clot. A key enzyme of the coagulation cascade is thrombin, which catalyzes formation of fibrin from fibrinogen. The distribution of thrombin concentration in blood plasma determines spatio-temporal dynamics of clot formation. Contact pathway of blood coagulation triggers the production of thrombin in response to the contact with a negatively charged surface. If the concentration of thrombin generated at this stage is large enough, further production of thrombin takes place due to positive feedback loops of the coagulation cascade. As a result, thrombin propagates in plasma cleaving fibrinogen that results in the clot formation. The concentration profile and the speed of propagation of thrombin are constant and do not depend on the type of the initial activator.

Such behavior of the coagulation system is well described by the traveling wave solutions in a system of “reaction – diffusion” equations on the concentration of blood factors involved in the coagulation cascade. In this study, we carried out detailed analysis of the mathematical model describing the main reaction of the intrinsic pathway of coagulation cascade.We formulate necessary and sufficient conditions of the existence of the traveling wave solutions. For the considered model the existence of such solutions is equivalent to the existence of the wave solutions in the simplified one-equation model describing the dynamics of thrombin concentration derived under the quasi-stationary approximation.

Simplified model also allows us to obtain analytical estimate of the thrombin propagation rate in the considered model. The speed of the traveling wave for one equation is estimated using the narrow reaction zone method and piecewise linear approximation. The resulting formulas give a good approximation of the velocity of propagation of thrombin in the simplified, as well as in the original model.

The transition from α-helices to β-strands under external mechanical force in fibrin molecule containing coiled-coils is studied and free energy landscape is resolved. The detailed theoretical modeling of each stage of coiled-coils fragment pulling process was performed. The plots of force (F) as a function of molecule expansion (X) for two symmetrical fibrin coiled-coils (each ∼17 nm in length) show three distinct modes of mechanical behaviour: (1) linear (elastic) mode when coiled-coils behave like entropic springs (F<100−125 pN and X<7−8 nm), (2) viscous (plastic) mode when molecule resistance force does not increase with increase in elongation length (F≈150 pN and X≈10−35 nm) and (3) nonlinear mode (F>175−200 pN and X>40−50 nm). In linear mode the coiled-coils unwind at 2π radian angle, but no structural transition occurs. Viscous mode is characterized by the phase transition from the triple α-spirals to three-stranded parallel β-sheet. The critical tension of α-helices is 0.25 nm per turn, and the characteristic energy change is equal to 4.9 kcal/mol. Changes in internal energy Δu, entropy Δs and force capacity c_f per one helical turn for phase transition were also computed. The observed dynamic behavior of α-helices and phase transition from α-helices to β-sheets under tension might represent a universal mechanism of regulation of fibrillar protein structures subject to mechanical stresses due to biological forces.