Contact Mechanics of a Small Icosahedral Virus
Abstract
Virus binding to a surface results at least locally, at the contact area, in stress and potential structural perturbation of the virus cage. Here we address the question of the role of substrate-induced deformation in the overall virus mechanical response to the adsorption event. This question may be especially important for the broad category of viruses that have their shells stabilized by weak, non-covalent interactions. We utilize atomic force microscopy to measure the height change distributions of the brome mosaic virus upon adsorption from liquid on atomically flat substrates and present a continuum model which captures well the behavior. Height data fitting according the model provides, without recourse to indentation, estimates of virus elastic properties and of the interfacial energy.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1701.07744,
title = {Contact Mechanics of a Small Icosahedral Virus},
author = {Cheng Zeng and Mercedes Hernando-Pérez and Xiang Ma and Paul van der Schoot and Roya Zandi and Bogdan Dragnea},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.07744},
year = {2017}
}