Impact of a non-uniform charge distribution on virus assembly
Biological Physics
2017-08-16 v1 Soft Condensed Matter
Abstract
Many spherical viruses encapsulate their genome in protein shells with icosahedral symmetry. This process is spontaneous and driven by electrostatic interactions between positive domains on the virus coat proteins and the negative genome. We model the effect of the icosahedral charge distribution from the protein shell instead of uniform using a mean-field theory. We find that the non-uniform charge distribution strongly affects the optimal genome length, and that it can explain the experimentally observed phenomenon of overcharging of virus and virus-like particles.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1705.02539,
title = {Impact of a non-uniform charge distribution on virus assembly},
author = {Siyu Li and Gonca Erdemci-Tandogan and Jef Wagner and Paul van der Schoot and Roya Zandi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.02539},
year = {2017}
}