Related papers: The Physics of Protein Self-Assembly
The possibility for proteins to aggregate in different superstructures, i.e. large-scale polymorphism, has been widely observed, but an understanding of the physico-chemical mechanisms behind it is still out of reach. Here we present a…
While all the information required for the folding of a protein is contained in its amino acid sequence, one has not yet learnt how to extract this information so as to predict the detailed, biological active, three-dimensional structure of…
Collective behavior of proteins on biomembranes is usually studied within the spontaneous curvature model. Here we consider an alternative phenomenological approach, which accounts consistently for partial ordering of proteins as well as…
Rigorous understanding of the self-assembly of colloidal nanocrystals is crucial to the development of tailored nanostructured materials. Despite extensive studies, a mechanistic understanding of self-assembly under non-equilibrium driven…
Proteins are dynamic, adopting ensembles of conformations. The nature of this conformational heterogenity is imprinted in the raw electron density measurements obtained from X-ray crystallography experiments. Fitting an ensemble of protein…
Atomic packing is an important metric for characterizing protein structures, as it significantly influences various features including the stability, the rate of evolution and the functional roles of proteins. Packing in protein structures…
Micrometre sized colloidal particles can be viewed as large atoms with tailorable size, shape and interactions. These building blocks can assemble into extremely rich structures and phases, in which the thermal motions of particles can be…
We propose a description for the quasi-equilibrium self-assembly of small, single-stranded (ss) RNA viruses whose capsid proteins (CPs) have flexible, positively charged, disordered tails that associate with the negatively charged RNA…
Proteins, by virtue of their central role in most biological processes, represent one of the key subjects of the study of molecular evolution. Inherent to the indispensability of proteins for living cells is the fact that a given protein…
The coat proteins of many viruses spontaneously form icosahedral capsids around nucleic acids or other polymers. Elucidating the role of the packaged polymer in capsid formation could promote biomedical efforts to block viral replication…
An approach that combines Self-Organizing maps, hierarchical clustering and network components is presented, aimed at comparing protein conformational ensembles obtained from multiple Molecular Dynamic simulations. As a first result the…
We present and study a minimal structure-based model for the self-assembly of peptides into ordered beta-sheet-rich fibrils. The peptides are represented by unit-length sticks on a cubic lattice and interact by hydrogen bonding and…
At low temperatures, colloidal particles with short-range attractive and long-range repulsive interactions can form various periodic microphases in bulk.In this paper, we investigate the self-assembly behaviour of colloids with competing…
The importance of understanding the mechanism of protein aggregation into insoluble amyloid fibrils relies not only on its medical consequences, but also on its more basic properties of self--organization. The discovery that a large number…
Endowing materials with physical intelligence holds the key for a progress leap in robotic systems. In spite of the growing success for macroscopic devices, transferring these concepts to the microscale presents several challenges connected…
The spatial organization of complex biochemical reactions is essential for the regulation of cellular processes. Membrane-less structures called foci containing high concentrations of specific proteins have been reported in a variety of…
The self-assembly of amphiphilic molecules usually takes place in a liquid phase, near room temperature. Here, using small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) experiments performed in real time, we show that freezing of aqueous solutions of…
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…
We use computer simulation to investigate the self-assembly of Janus-like amphiphilic peanut-shaped nanoparticles, finding phases of clusters, bilayers and micelles in accord with ideas of packing familiar from the study of molecular…
We describe some of the important physical characteristics of the `pathways', i.e. dynamical processes, by which molecular, nanoscale and micron-scale self-assembly occurs. We highlight the fact that there exist features of self-assembly…