Related papers: Modeling capsid self-assembly: Design and analysis
From the analysis of sizes of approximately 130 small icosahedral viruses we find that there is a typical structural capsid protein, having a mean diameter of 5 nm and a mean thickness of 3 nm, with more than two thirds of the analyzed…
In this work we study how a viral capsid can change conformation using techniques of Large Deviations Theory for stochastic differential equations. The viral capsid is a model of a complex system in which many units - the proteins forming…
The design of complex materials and the formation of specific patterns often arise from the properties of the individual building blocks. In this respect, colloidal systems offer a unique opportunity because nowadays they can be synthesized…
The field of complex self-assembly is moving toward the design of multi-particle structures consisting of thousands of distinct building blocks. To exploit the potential benefits of structures with such `addressable complexity,' we need to…
Complex colloidal cluster morphologies are desirable for the fabrication of advanced materials, such as photonic crystals and meta-materials, and can be formed through evaporation-driven packing. By coupling lattice Boltzmann and discrete…
A modulated icosahedral shell with an inclusion is a concise description of many viruses, including recently-discovered large double-stranded DNA ones. Many X-ray scattering patterns of such viruses show major polygonal fringes, which can…
A model of growth of icosahedral viral capsids is proposed. It takes into account the diversity of hexamers' compositions, leading to definite capsid size. We show that the observed yield of capsid production implies a very high level of…
Assembly of protein complexes like virus shells, the centriole, the nuclear pore complex or the actin cytoskeleton is strongly determined by their spatial structure. Moreover it is becoming increasingly clear that the reversible nature of…
Protein folding, peptide aggregation and crystallization, as well as adsorption of molecules on soft or solid substrates have an essential feature in common: In all these processes, structure formation is guided by a collective, cooperative…
Self-assembly is one of the prevalent strategies used by living systems to fabricate ensembles of precision nanometer-scale structures and devices. The push for analogous approaches to create synthetic nanomaterials has led to the…
We report small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) experiments on aqueous dispersions of colloidal silica with a broad monomodal size distribution (polydispersity 18%, size 8 nm). Over a range of volume fractions the silica particles segregate…
The inverse problem of designing component interactions to target emergent structure is fundamental to numerous applications in biotechnology, materials science, and statistical physics. Equally important is the inverse problem of designing…
Studying physical mechanisms and common geometric principles underlying known spherical packings is crucial for rational design of synthetic nanocontainers. Here we model the growth of small spherical shells containing n<72 identical…
We use numerical simulations to show how noninteracting hard particles binding to a deformable elastic shell may self-assemble into a variety of linear patterns. This is a result of the nontrivial elastic response to deformations of shells.…
In many viruses, hundreds of proteins assemble an outer shell (capsid) around the viral nucleic acid to form an infectious virion. How the assembly process selects the viral genome amidst a vast excess of diverse cellular nucleic acids is…
Self-assembly kinetics is usually described by approaches which assume that the shape of the aggregates has a definite form (e.g., spherical, cylindrical, cubic, etc), however that is unlikely to be the case in many finite-sized…
From dumbbells to FCC crystals, we study the self-assembly pathway of amphiphatic, spherical colloidal particles as a function of the size of the hydrophobic region using molecular dynamics simulations. Specifically, we analyze how local…
A challenge of molecular self-assembly is to understand how to design particles that self-assemble into a desired structure and not any of a potentially large number of undesired structures. Here we use simulation to show that a strategy of…
Hierarchical granular piles composed of aggregates are key structural features in both geoscience and planetary science, from fault gouge in seismic zones to the internal structures of comets. Although experimental studies have suggested a…
The fluid phase diagram of trimer particles composed of one central attractive bead and two repulsive beads was determined as a function of simple geometric parameters using flat-histogram Monte Carlo methods. A variety of self-assembled…