Related papers: The role of packaging sites in efficient and speci…
In $\textit{Escherichia coli}$ bacterium, the molecular compounds involved in protein synthesis, messenger RNAs (mRNAs) and ribosomes, show marked intracellular localization patterns. Yet a quantitative understanding of the physical…
Large protein assemblies, such as virus capsids, may be coarse-grained as a set of rigid domains linked by generalized (rotational and stretching) harmonic springs. We present a method to obtain the elastic parameters and overdamped…
Several recent works have shown that protein structure can predict site-specific evolutionary sequence variation. In particular, sites that are buried and/or have many contacts with other sites in a structure have been shown to evolve more…
We present an analytically solvable model for self-assembly of a molecular complex on a filament. The process is driven by a seed molecule that undergoes facilitated diffusion, which is a search strategy that combines diffusion in…
Although both RNA and proteins have densely packed native structures, chain organizations of these two biopolymers are fundamentally different. Motivated by the recent discoveries in chromatin folding that interphase chromosomes have…
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 vivo configurations of dsDNA of bacteriophage viruses in a capsid are known to form hexagonal chromonic liquid crystal phases. This article studies the liquid crystal ordering of viral dsDNA in an icosahedral capsid, combining the…
Proteins must bind to specific other proteins in vivo in order to function. The proteins must bind only to one or a few other proteins of the of order a thousand proteins typically present in vivo. Using a simple model of a protein,…
Curved structures in soft matter and biological systems commonly emerge as a result of self-assembly processes where building blocks aggregate in a controlled manner, giving rise to specific system structure and properties. Learning how to…
The paper investigates a novel approach, based on Constraint Logic Programming (CLP), to predict the 3D conformation of a protein via fragments assembly. The fragments are extracted by a preprocessor-also developed for this work- from a…
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…
Understanding how highly symmetric, robust, monodisperse protein cages self-assemble can have major applications in various areas of bio-nanotechnology, such as drug delivery, biomedical imaging and gene therapy. We develop a model to…
The task of RNA design given a target structure aims to find a sequence that can fold into that structure. It is a computationally hard problem where some version(s) have been proven to be NP-hard. As a result, heuristic methods such as…
The question of how stiff polymers are able to pack into small containers is particularly relevant to the study of DNA packaging in viruses. A reduced version of the problem based on coarse-grained representations of the main components of…
Biomolecular condensates self-assemble when proteins and nucleic acids spontaneously demix to form droplets within the crowded intracellular milieu. This simple mechanism underlies the formation of a wide variety of membraneless…
One of the challenges of self-assembling finite-sized colloidal aggregates with a sought morphology is the necessity of precisely sorting the position of the colloids at the microscopic scale to avoid the formation of off-target structures.…
Cyanobacteria sequester photosynthetic enzymes into microcompartments which facilitate the conversion of carbon dioxide into sugars. Geometric similarities between these structures and self-assembling viral capsids have inspired models that…
The majority of viruses are organised according to the structural blueprints of the seminal Caspar-Klug theory. However, there are a number of notable exceptions to this geometric design principle. Prominent examples are the cancer-causing…
In recent years significant attention has been attracted to proposals which utilize DNA for nanotechnological applications. Potential applications of these ideas range from the programmable self-assembly of colloidal crystals, to biosensors…
Myriad viruses use positive-strand RNA molecules as their genomes. Far from being only a repository of genetic material, viral RNA performs numerous other functions mediated by its physical structure and chemical properties. In this…