Fig. 5

Time-dependent clustering of GNPs in endosomes for Beas-2B cells. Comparison of the number of endosomes \(\Sigma\) with clusters containing 4–6, 7–12 and more than 12 GNPs obtained by integration of time-dependent density \(n(x,\tau )\) Eq. (14) (the dashed, the dashed-dotted and the dotted curves) with the experimental data of Wang et al. (2016) (the lines with symbols and error bars) for Beas-2B cells. Here \(\tau =K t\) is the dimensionless time. The initial number of endosomes in each group was 73 (endosomes with clusters containing 4–6), 23 (containing 7–12 clusters) and 2 (containing \(>12\) clusters). Experimental data points were acquired starting from \(t=1\) h (Wang et al. 2016)