Related papers: Beyond icosahedral symmetry in packings of protein…
The use of reduced models for investigating the self-assembly dynamics underlying protein shell formation in spherical viruses is described. The spontaneous self-assembly of these polyhedral, supramolecular structures, in which icosahedral…
The regular polyhedra have the highest order of 3D symmetries and are exceptionally at- tractive templates for (self)-assembly using minimal types of building blocks, from nano-cages and virus capsids to large scale constructions like glass…
The native state structures of globular proteins are stable and well-packed indicating that self-interactions are favored over protein-solvent interactions under folding conditions. We use this as a guiding principle to derive the geometry…
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…
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…
Dense packings have served as useful models of the structure of liquid, glassy and crystal states of matter, granular media, heterogeneous materials, and biological systems. Probing the symmetries and other mathematical properties of the…
Spherical viral shells with icosahedral symmetry have been considered as quasicrystalline tilings. Similarly to known Caspar-Klug quasi-equivalence theory, the presented approach also minimizes the number of conformations necessary for the…
We introduce a simple "patchy particle" model to study the thermodynamics and dynamics of self-assembly of homomeric protein complexes. Our calculations allow us to rationalize recent results for dihedral complexes. Namely, why evolution of…
The packaging of genetic material within a protein shell, called the capsid, marks a pivotal step in the life cycle of numerous single-stranded RNA viruses. Understanding how hundreds, or even thousands, of proteins assemble around the…
Protein structures in nature often exhibit a high degree of regularity (secondary structures, tertiary symmetries, etc.) absent in random compact conformations. We demonstrate in a simple lattice model of protein folding that structural…
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.…
The self-assembly of particles into organized structures is a key feature of living organisms and a major engineering challenge. While it may proceed through the binding of perfectly matched, puzzle-pieces-like particles, many other…
A new tetrahedral structure model was developed and the geometrical structure of jammed disordered packings of monodisperse spheres with different friction coefficients was systematically characterized. An intrinsic structure feature is…
Structural organization and correlations are studied in very large packings of equally sized acrylic spheres, reconstructed in three-dimensions by means of X-ray computed tomography. A novel technique, devised to analyze correlations among…
We present a series of experiments investigating the local microstructure of cylindrical piles composed of highly concave particles. By systematically varying particle geometry -- from spheres to strongly non-convex polypods -- as well as…
We present a method for discovering dense packings of general convex hard particles and apply it to study the dense packing behavior of a one-parameter family of particles with tetrahedral symmetry representing a deformation of the ideal…
We systematically explore the self-assembly of semi-flexible polymers in deformable spherical confinement across a wide regime of chain stiffness, contour lengths and packing fractions by means of coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
Rigid particles pack into structures, such as sand dunes on the beach, whose overall stability is determined by the average number of contacts between particles. However, when packing spatially extended objects with flexible shapes,…
We numerically study structural properties of mechanically stable packings of hard spheres (HS), in a wide range of packing fractions $0.53 \le \phi \le 0.72$. Detailed structural information is obtained from the analysis of orientational…
Proteinaceous shells useful for various biomedical applications exhibit a wide range of anomalous structures that are fundamentally different from icosahedral viral capsids described by the Caspar-Klug paradigmatic model. Exploring the…