Collective Langevin dynamics of flexible cytoskeletal fibers

2007/11/30 by François Nédélec, Francois Nedelec, Dietrich Foethke · 3 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Brownian dynamics #Brownian motion #Cellular Mechanics and Interactions #Classical mechanics #Gene Regulatory Network Analysis #Inertia #Langevin dynamics #Langevin equation #Microtubule and mitosis dynamics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Scale (ratio) #Statistical physics #q-bio.CB #q-bio.SC

paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1367-2630/9/11/427

published as Francois Nedelec et al 2007 New J. Phys. 9 427 · 27 pages, 10 figures

openalex publication_date 2007/11/30 · arxiv created 2009/03/30 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

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.

Citations

• An Introduction to Stochastic Processes in Physics
• MICROTUBULE POLYMERIZATION DYNAMICS
• Stochastic Simulation of Chemical Kinetics

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