Advances in biomolecular surface meshing and its applications to mathematical modeling

In the field of molecular modeling and simulation, molecular surface meshes are necessary for many problems, such as molecular structure visualization and analysis, docking problem and implicit solvent modeling and simulation. Recently, with the developments of advanced mathematical modeling in the field of implicit solvent modeling and simulation, providing surface meshes with good qualities efficiently for large real biomolecular systems becomes an urgent issue beyond its traditional purposes for visualization and geometry analyses for molecular structure. In this review, we summarize recent works on this issue. First, various definitions of molecular surfaces and corresponding meshing methods are introduced. Second, our recent meshing tool, TMSmesh, and its performances are presented. Finally, we show the applications of the molecular surface mesh in implicit solvent modeling and simulations using boundary element method (BEM) and finite element method (FEM).