Related papers: Allosteric control in icosahedral capsid assembly
Recent high resolution structures for viral capsids with 12, 32 and 72 subunits ($T1$, $T3$ and $T7$ viruses) have confirmed theoretical predictions of an icosadeltahedral structure with 12 subunits having five nearest neighbors (pentamers)…
Colloidal particles with mobile binding molecules constitute a powerful platform for probing the physics of self-assembly. Binding molecules are free to diffuse and rearrange on the surface, giving rise to spontaneous control over the…
The Caspar-Klug classification of viruses whose protein shell, called viral capsid, exhibits icosahedral symmetry, has recently been extended to incorporate viruses whose capsid proteins are exclusively organised in pentamers. The approach,…
A vital constituent of a virus is its protein shell, called the viral capsid, that encapsulates and hence provides protection for the viral genome. Viral capsids are usually spherical, and for a significant number of viruses exhibit overall…
The cornerstone of structural biology is the unique relationship between protein sequence and the 3D structure at equilibrium. Although intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) do not fold into a specific 3D structure, breaking this…
Colloidal crystal structures with complexity and diversity rivaling atomic and molecular crystals have been predicted and obtained for hard particles by entropy maximization. However, so far homochiral colloidal crystals, which are…
Molecular dynamics simulation is used to model the self-assembly of polyhedral shells containing 180 trapezoidal particles that correspond to the T=3 virus capsid. Three kinds of particle, differing only slightly in shape, are used to…
The sequence of a protein is not only constrained by its physical and biochemical properties under current selection, but also by features of its past evolutionary history. Understanding the extent and the form that these evolutionary…
We develop a clear theoretical description of radial swelling in virus-like particles which delineates the importance of electrostatic contributions to swelling in absence of any conformational changes. The model couples the elastic…
We investigate the self-assembly (crystallisation) of particles with hard cores and isotropic, square-well interactions, using a Monte Carlo scheme to simulate overdamped Langevin dynamics. We measure correlation and response functions…
The relationship between interactions, flexibility and disorder in proteins has been explored from many angles: folding upon binding, flexibility of the core relative to the periphery, entropy changes, etc. In this work, we provide…
Minimal energy shapes of closed, elastic shells with twelve pentagonal disclinations introduced in otherwise hexagonally coordinated crystalline lattice are studied. The geometry and the total energy of shells are studied as a function of…
The self-assembly of anisotropic building blocks into complex spatial architectures is an important design strategy in material science but the mechanisms by which the anisotropic interactions influence the early-stage growth and formation…
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…
The distribution of inequivalent geometries occurring during self-assembly of the major capsid protein in thermodynamic equilibrium is determined based on a master equation approach. These results are implemented to characterize the…
Molecular simulations of the self-assembly of cone-shaped particles with specific, attractive interactions are performed. Upon cooling from random initial conditions, we find that the cones self assemble into clusters and that clusters…
Cellular membranes exhibit a large variety of shapes, strongly coupled to their function. Many biological processes involve dynamic reshaping of membranes, usually mediated by proteins. This interaction works both ways: while proteins…
We carry out a coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation of phospholipid vesicles with transmembrane proteins. We measure the mean and Gaussian curvatures of our protein-embedded vesicles and quantitatively show how protein clusters…
Motivated by recent experimental findings in chemical synthesis of colloidal particles, we draw an analogy between self-assembly processes occurring in biological systems (e.g. protein folding) and a new exciting possibility in the field of…
Light-activated colloidal assembly and swarming can act as model systems to explore non-equilibrium state of matter. In this context, creating new experimental platforms to facilitate and control two-dimensional assembly of colloidal…