Related papers: The Physics of Protein Self-Assembly
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…
We develop coarse-grained models that describe the dynamic encapsidation of functionalized nanoparticles by viral capsid proteins. We find that some forms of cooperative interactions between protein subunits and nanoparticles can…
Spontaneous mechanical self-assembly of monodisperse bubbles generally leads to disordered foams at low density: producing crystalline structures such as Kelvin foams has proven to be challenging experimentally, despite them being a minimum…
The molecular self-assembly of various structures such as micelles and vesicles has been the subject of comprehensive studies. Recently, a new approach to design these structures, the frame-guided assembly, has been developed to progress…
A variety of neurodegenerative diseases are associated with the formation of amyloid plaques. Our incomplete understanding of this process underscores the need to decipher the principles governing protein aggregation. Most experimental and…
Protein amyloidosis is a cytopathological process characterized by the formation of highly beta-sheet-rich fibrils. How this process occurs and how to prevent/treat the associated diseases are not completely understood. Here, we carry out a…
The intricate three-dimensional geometries of protein tertiary structures underlie protein function and emerge through a folding process from one-dimensional chains of amino acids. The exact spatial sequence and configuration of amino…
A fundamental goal of research in molecular biology is to understand protein structure. Protein crystallography is currently the most successful method for determining the three-dimensional (3D) conformation of a protein, yet it remains…
Previous self-assembly experiments on a model icosahedral plant virus have shown that, under physiological conditions, capsid proteins initially bind to the genome through an en masse mechanism and form nucleoprotein complexes in a…
A collection of thin structures buckle, bend, and bump into each-other when confined. This contact can lead to the formation of patterns: hair will self-organize in curls; DNA strands will layer into cell nuclei; paper, when crumpled, will…
Single-stranded (ss) RNA viruses self-assemble spontaneously in solutions that contain the viral RNA genome molecules and the viral capsid proteins. The self-assembly of empty capsids can be understood on the basis of free energy…
We present a statistical mechanics approach to the protein folding problem. We first review some of the basic properties of proteins, and introduce some physical models to describe their thermodynamics. These models rely on a random…
Since the 1920s, packing arguments have been used to rationalize crystal structures in systems ranging from atomic mixtures to colloidal crystals. Packing arguments have recently been applied to complex nanoparticle structures, where they…
The self-assembly of proteins into $\beta$-sheet-rich amyloid fibrils has been observed to occur with sigmoidal kinetics, indicating that the system initially is trapped in a metastable state. Here, we use a minimal lattice-based model to…
Classification of proteins based on their structure provides a valuable resource for studying protein structure, function and evolutionary relationships. With the rapidly increasing number of known protein structures, manual and…
A framework is presented for understanding the common character of proteins. Proteins are linear chain molecules. However, the simple model of a polymer viewed as spheres tethered together does not account for many of the observed…
This review article discusses some common enhanced sampling methods in relation to the process of self-assembly of biomolecules. An introduction to self-assembly and its challenges is covered followed by a brief overview of the methods and…
Biological systems exploit self-assembly to create complex structures whose arrangements are finely controlled from molecular to mesoscopic level. Herein we report an example of using fully synthetic systems that mimic two levels of…
We present a quantitative measure of physical complexity, based on the amount of information required to build a given physical structure through self-assembly. Our procedure can be adapted to any given geometry, and thus to any given type…
Novel numerical techniques, validated by an analysis of barnase and chymotrypsin inhibitor, are used to elucidate the paramount role played by the geometry of the protein backbone in steering the folding to the correct native state. It is…