Center Seminars & Workshops

We introduce surface fluctuating hydrodynamics approaches for investigating transport and fluid-structure interactions arising in cell mechanics within curved lipid bilayer membranes. We focus particularly on drift-diffusion dynamics of interacting proteins and microstructures. We show how a mesoscale stochastic description of the mechanics can be formulated (SPDEs) accounting for geometric contributions, hydrodynamic coupling, and thermal fluctuations. The underlying stochastic equations (SPDEs) pose practical challenges for use in simulations, including, (i) a need for accurate and stable discretizations of geometric terms and differential operators on curved geometries, (ii) techniques for hydrodynamics handling surface incompressibility constraints, and (iii) stiffness from rapid time-scales introduced by the thermal fluctuations. We show how practical spectral methods and meshfree computational approaches can be developed for simulations over long spatial-temporal scales. We then present results for protein and microstructure interactions within membranes and the roles played by hydrodynamic coupling and geometry. For related simulation software and more information, see http://atzberger.org/