Continuum-Level Simulations of Biopolymer Networks: A Minireview

Abstract

The mechanical properties of living cells are governed by the cytoskeleton, a network consisting of many different biopolymers together with transient linker proteins [1]. Biopolymers, especially those composed of globular proteins, are known to be semiflexible, that is the persistence length of these filaments is often comparable to their contour length, leading to small, yet significant, thermal fluctuations around a straight conformation and ultimately resulting in mechanical properties far from those exhibited by synthetic materials made of highly flexible polymers [2]. Theoretically, it remains a great challenge to understand/predict how a semiflexible filament network behave because of its many-body nature as well as the coupled elastic and entropic effects involved. For this reason, there has been a growing interest in the direct simulation on computer-generated networks in recent years. Here, we briefly review various continuum-level simulation approaches that have been developed in the past few decades.