Collective Langevin Dynamics of Flexible Cytoskeletal Fibers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a numerical method for simulating the Brownian motion of flexible cytoskeletal fibers and other structures in viscous media, emphasizing computational efficiency and applicability to biological modeling.

Contribution

It presents a novel, efficient numerical approach to simulate the Langevin dynamics of composite mechanical structures like cytoskeletal fibers in viscous environments.

Findings

Method effectively simulates fiber dynamics in viscous media

Applicable to cytoskeletal modeling with multiple examples

Computational efficiency demonstrated

Abstract

We develop a numerical method to simulate mechanical objects in a viscous medium at a scale where inertia is negligible. Fibers, spheres and other voluminous objects are represented with points. Different types of connections are used to link the points together and in this way create composite mechanical structures. The motion of such structures in a Brownian environment is described by a first-order multivariate Langevin equation. We propose a computationally efficient method to integrate the equation, and illustrate the applicability of the method to cytoskeletal modeling with several examples.