Related papers: Stiffness heterogeneity of small viral capsids
Recent Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) nanoindentation experiments measuring mechanical response of the protein shells of viruses have provided a quantitative description of their strength and elasticity. To better understand and interpret…
We study the elastic properties and mechanical stability of viral capsids under external force-loading with computer simulations. Our approach allows the implementation of specific geometries corresponding to specific phages such as…
Polymorphism has been observed in viral capsid assembly, demonstrating the ability of identical protein dimers to adopt multiple geometries under the same solution conditions. A well-studied example is the hepatitis B virus (HBV), which…
Structural and mechanical differences between cancerous and healthy tissue give rise to variations in macroscopic properties such as visual appearance and elastic modulus that show promise as signatures for early cancer detection. Atomic…
Viruses are known to tolerate wide ranges of pH and salt conditions and to withstand internal pressures as high as 100 atmospheres. In this paper we investigate the mechanical properties of viral capsids, calling explicit attention to the…
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…
The so-called indentation stiffness tomography technique for detecting the interior mechanical properties of an elastic sample with an inhomogeneity is analyzed in the framework of the asymptotic modeling approach under the assumption of…
Ultrasound Atomic Force Microscopy (US-AFM) has been used for subsurface imaging of nanostructures. The contact stiffness variations have been suggested as the origin of the image contrast. Therefore, to analyze the image contrast, the…
This work proposes a new efficient approach for calculating the bending stiffness of two-dimensional materials using simple atomistic tests on small periodic unit cells. The tests are designed such that bending deformations are dominating…
Nano-indentation based on, e.g., atomic force microscopy (AFM), can measure single cell elasticity with high spatial resolution and sensitivity, but relating the data to cell mechanical properties depends on modeling that requires knowledge…
Nanoscale molecular transport plays a crucial role in regulating mass diffusion and responsiveness in condensed matter systems. In soft porous crystals, in particular, adsorption of guest molecules induces host framework deformation and…
An adhesively stressed thin film of a soft hydrogel confined between two rigid flat substrates auto-roughens with its dominant wavelength exhibiting pronounced dependence on the film thickness (H). A linear stability analysis confirmed that…
We use an elastic model to explore faceting of solid-wall vesicles with elastic heterogeneities. We show that faceting occurs in regions where the vesicle wall is softer, such as areas of reduced wall thicknesses or concentrated in…
We have studied the low speed fracture regime for different glassy materials with variable but controlled length scales of heterogeneity in a carefully mastered surrounding atmosphere. By using optical and atomic force (AFM) microscopy…
Virus binding to a surface results at least locally, at the contact area, in stress and potential structural perturbation of the virus cage. Here we address the question of the role of substrate-induced deformation in the overall virus…
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…
Measurements with an atomic force microscope (AFM) offer a direct way to probe elastic properties of lipid bilayer membranes locally: provided the underlying stress-strain relation is known, material parameters such as surface tension or…
Investigation of inhomogeneities has wide applications in different areas of mechanics including the study of composite materials. Here, we analytically study an arbitrarily-shaped isotropic inhomogeneity embedded in a finite-sized…
Biological cells are built up from many different constituents of varying size and stiffness which all contribute to the cell's mechanical properties. Despite this heterogeneity, in the analysis of experimental measurements such as atomic…
Atomistic simulations are used to test the equations of continuum contact mechanics in nanometer scale contacts. Nominally spherical tips, made by bending crystals or cutting crystalline or amorphous solids, are pressed into a flat, elastic…