They also argue that a very large persistence length implies that the cyanobacteria are stiff enough to largely be unaffected by thermal fluctuations.
Following Equation (13), it is stated that “The interpolation ensures the net force and net torque of the interaction forces are null”. This confuses me so I suspect that I have misunderstood something. In an overdamped system, such as this one, all forces and torques are balanced by drag on the cell. Is this all that is happening in this derivation? The text reads like certain forces and torques are assumed to vanish. Are these forces and torques introduced by the interpolation and the parameterization is chosen to cancel artifacts? Or, are there internal forces and and torques acting on the vertices that cancel as a result of Newton’s second law? Please clarify this point.