Particle-Based Methods for Mesoscopic Transport Processes

Biological phenomena at cellular and subcellular levels involve transport of reacting biochemical species, including proteins, enzymes, and nutrients. At the mesoscopic scale, stochastic effects can play an important role and dominate the biological processes. Therefore, the continuum deterministic description, which ignores fluctuations, becomes no longer accurate. To this end, mesoscopic methods with stochastic terms are attracting more attention as a promising approach for tackling challenging problems in cellular biology and bioengineering. This chapter describes particle-based stochastic models for mesoscopic transport processes, including thermal transport, reactive chemical transport, and ionic transport in mesoscopic systems.