Incorporating thermal fluctuations into the immersed boundary method

We present a new computational method for simulating microscopic processes in physiology which accounts for stochastic thermal fluctuations and a dynamically evolving fluid environment. This latter feature is a principal advantage of our method relative to Brownian or Stokesian particle dynamics methods. Our approach builds on the "immersed boundary method" of Peskin, which simplifies the coupling between the fluid and the immersed particles and membranes so as to avoid complex boundary problems.