Related papers: Anomalous proteinaceous shells with octagonal loca…
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…
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,…
The formation of quasi-spherical cages from protein building blocks is a remarkable self-assembly process in many natural systems, where a small number of elementary building blocks are assembled to build a highly symmetric icosahedral…
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…
A pentagonal order formed by 360 proteins in the bovine papilloma viral capsid and structures of some smaller viral capsids are considered from a unified point of view based on the Landau crystallization theory. To simulate the capsid…
Quasicrystals are fascinating structures, characterized by strong positional order but lacking the periodicity of a crystal. In colloidal systems, quasicrystals are typically predicted for particles with complex or highly specific…
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…
We apply Landau theory of crystallization to explain and to classify the capsid structures of small viruses with spherical topology and icosahedral symmetry. We develop an explicit method which predicts the positions of centers of mass for…
DNA nanoparticles with three-fold coordination have been observed to self-assemble in experiment into a network equivalent to the hexagonal (6.6.6) tiling, and a network equivalent to the 4.8.8 Archimedean tiling. Both networks are built…
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…
We devise an ideal 3-dimensional octagonal quasicrystal that is based upon the 2-dimensional Ammann-Beenker tiling and that is potentially suitable for realization with patchy particles. Based on an analysis of its local environments we…
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…
Classical Landau theory considers structural phase transitions and crystallization as a condensation of several critical density waves whose wave vectors are symmetrically equivalent. Analyzing the simplest nonequilibrium Landau potentials…
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…
While performing molecular dynamics simulations of a simple monatomic liquid, we observed the crystallization of a material displaying octagonal symmetry in its simulated diffraction pattern. Inspection of the atomic arrangements in the…
We propose a means to realize two-dimensional quasiperiodic structures by trapping atoms in an optical potential. The structures have eight-fold symmetry and are closely related to the well-known quasiperiodic octagonal (Ammann-Beenker)…
Protein nanoparticles play pivotal roles in many areas of bionanotechnology, including drug delivery, vaccination and diagnostics. These technologies require control over the distinct particle morphologies that protein nanocontainers can…
We study the phase behaviour of a quasi-two dimensional cholesteric liquid crystal shell. We characterise the topological phases arising close to the isotropic-cholesteric transition, and show that they differ in a fundamental way from…
We show that the icosahedral packings of protein capsomeres proposed by Caspar and Klug for spherical viruses become unstable to faceting for sufficiently large virus size, in analogy with the buckling instability of disclinations in…
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…