Related papers: Virus shapes and buckling transitions in spherical…
Many spherical viruses encapsulate their genome in protein shells with icosahedral symmetry. This process is spontaneous and driven by electrostatic interactions between positive domains on the virus coat proteins and the negative genome.…
Recent studies reveal that certain viruses package a portion of their genome in a manner that mirrors the icosahedral symmetry of the protein container, or capsid. Graph theoretical constraints forbid exact realization of icosahedral…
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…
We study elasticity-driven morphological transitions of soft spherical core shell structures in which the core can be treated as an isotropic elastic continuum and the surface or shell as a tensionless liquid layer, whose elastic response…
Previous self-assembly experiments on a model icosahedral plant virus have shown that, under physiological conditions, capsid proteins initially bind to the genome through an en masse mechanism and form nucleoprotein complexes in a…
The results of a numerical investigation of fluidized beds of spherical particles in a narrow vertical cylindrical pipe, with particular attention to the spontaneous settling along the wall, are reported. Starting from a steady fluidized…
On microscopic scales, the crystallinity of flexible tethered or cross linked membranes determines their mechanical response. We show that by controlling the type, number and distribution of defects on a spherical elastic shell, it is…
We present an analysis of an extended Rayleigh-Plesset (RP) equation for a three dimensional cell of microorganisms such as bacteria or viruses in some liquid, where the cell membrane in bacteria or the envelope (capsid) in viruses possess…
In this paper we present a three-dimensional discrete model governing the deformation of a viral capsid, modelled as a regular icosahedron and subjected not to cross a given flat rigid surface on which it initially lies in correspondence of…
We consider the point indentation of a pressurized, spherical elastic shell. Previously it was shown that such shells wrinkle once the indentation reaches a threshold value. Here, we study the behaviour of this system beyond the onset of…
We present a combined theoretical and experimental study of the buckling of a thin film wrapped around a sphere under the action of capillary forces. A rigid sphere is coated with a wetting liquid, and then wrapped by a thin film into an…
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 original Thomson problem of "spherical crystallography" seeks the ground state of electron shells interacting via the Coulomb potential; however one can also study crystalline ground states of particles interacting with other…
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…
Motivated by recent experiments on the rod-like virus bacteriophage fd, confined to circular and annular domains, we present a theoretical study of structural transitions in these geometries. Using the continuum theory of nematic liquid…
The majority of viruses are organised according to the structural blueprints of the seminal Caspar-Klug theory. However, there are a number of notable exceptions to this geometric design principle. Prominent examples are the cancer-causing…
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…
In a seminal paper Caspar and Klug established a theory that provides a family of polyhedra as blueprints for the structural organisation of viral capsids. In particular, they encode the locations of the proteins in the shells that…
We present a generalized Landau-Brazovskii theory for the solidification of chiral molecules on a spherical surface. With increasing sphere radius one encounters first intervals where robust achiral density modulations appear with…
Spherical particles confined to a sphere surface cannot pack densely into a hexagonal lattice without defects. In this study, we use hard particle Monte Carlo simulations to determine the effects of continuously deformable shape anisotropy…