Related papers: Nonequilibrium assembly of Lennard-Jones particles…
To learn about basic aspects of nano-scale spherical molecular shells during their formation, spherically curved two-dimensional N-particle Lennard-Jones systems are simulated, studying curvature evolution paths at zero-temperature. For…
Highly symmetric nano-shells are found in many biological systems, such as clathrin cages and viral shells. Several studies have shown that symmetric shells appear in nature as a result of the free energy minimization of a generic…
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…
We model an isothermal aggregation process of particles/atoms interacting according to the Lennard-Jones pair potential by mapping the energy landscapes of each cluster size $N$ onto stochastic networks, computing transition probabilities…
While alloy, core-shell and Janus binary nanoclusters are found in more and more technological applications, their formation mechanisms are still poorly understood, especially during synthesis methods involving physical approaches. In this…
The dense packing of interacting particles on spheres has proved to be a useful model for virus capsids and colloidosomes. Indeed, icosahedral symmetry observed in virus capsids corresponds to potential energy minima that occur for magic…
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.…
We study the self-assembly behaviour of patchy particles with `protein-like' interactions that can be considered as a minimal model for the assembly of viral capsids and other shell-like protein complexes. We thoroughly explore the…
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…
We investigate by Molecular Dynamics simulation a system of $N$ particles moving on the surface of a two-dimensional sphere and interacting by a Lennard-Jones potential. We detail the way to account for the changes brought by a nonzero…
We analyze the structure diagram for binary clusters of Lennard-Jones particles by means of a global optimization approach for a large range of cluster sizes, compositions and interaction energies and present a publicly accessible database…
The protein shells, or capsids, of all sphere-like viruses adopt icosahedral symmetry. In the present paper we propose a statistical thermodynamic model for viral self-assembly. We find that icosahedral symmetry is not expected for viral…
The influence of quadrupolar interactions on the structure of small clusters is investigated by adding a point quadrupole of variable strength to the Lennard-Jones potential. Competition arises between sheet-like arrangements of the…
Self-assembly of Janus (or `patchy') particles is dependent on the precise interaction between neighbouring particles. Here, the orientations of two amphiphilic Janus spheres within a dimer in an explicit fluid are studied with high…
Nested sampling was employed to investigate adsorption equilibria on the truncated-octahedral Lennard-Jones nanocluster LJ$_{38}$ while systematically varying adsorbate-surface well depth and Lennard-Jones size parameters. Evaluation of the…
We report molecular dynamics calculations on two-component, cold (1.2 > T > 0.56 in natural units), three-dimensional Lennard-Jones fluids. Our system was small (7813 A, 7812 B particles), dense (N/V = 1.30), and distinctly finite (L \times…
We present a simple non-equilibrium model of mass condensation with Lennard-Jones interactions between particles and the substrate. We show that when some number of particles is deposited onto the surface and the system is left to…
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…
Non-equilibrium transport of particles embedded in a liquid crystal host can, by cooling through a phase transition, be exploited to create a remarkable variety of structures including shells, foams, and gels. Due to the complexity of the…
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…