Related papers: Virus shapes and buckling transitions in spherical…
Topological defects are crucial to the thermodynamics and structure of condensed matter systems. For instance, when incorporated into crystalline membranes like graphene, disclinations with positive and negative topological charge…
We report on the buckling and subsequent collapse of orthotropic elastic spherical shells under volume and pressure control. Going far beyond what is known for isotropic shells, a rich morphological phase space with three distinct regimes…
The asymmetry in the shapes of folded and unfolded states are probed using two parameters, one being a measure of the sphericity and the other that describes the shape. For the folded states, whose interiors are densely packed, the radii of…
Determination of sizes and flexibilities of RNA molecules is important in understanding the nature of packing in folded structures and in elucidating interactions between RNA and DNA or proteins. Using the coordinates of the structures of…
Shapes and energies of icosahedral fullerenes are studied on an atomically detailed level. The numerical results based on the effective binary carbon-carbon potential are related to the theory of elasticity of crystalline membranes with…
In Euclidean space, the asymptotic shape of large cells in various types of Poisson driven random tessellations has been the subject of a famous conjecture due to David Kendall. Since shape is a geometric concept and large cells are…
We investigate how thin structures change their shape in response to non-mechanical stimuli that can be interpreted as variations in the structure's natural curvature. Starting from the theory of non-Euclidean plates and shells, we derive…
We have prepared a homologous series of filamentous viruses with varying contour length using molecular cloning techniques. These viruses are monodisperse enough to form a stable smectic phase. Two systems are studied. The first system…
Ebert et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 3827 (1996)] have fractured icosahedral Al-Mn-Pd single crystals in ultrahigh vacuum and have investigated the cleavage planes in-situ by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). Globular patterns in the…
We carry out a coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation of phospholipid vesicles with transmembrane proteins. We measure the mean and Gaussian curvatures of our protein-embedded vesicles and quantitatively show how protein clusters…
We study equilibrium shapes and shape transformations of a confined semiflexible chain inside a soft lipid tubule using simulations and continuum theories. The deformed tubular shapes and chain conformations depend on the relative magnitude…
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 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…
We present a top-down approach to the study of the dynamics of icosahedral virus capsids, in which each protein is approximated by a point mass. Although this represents a rather crude coarse-graining, we argue that it highlights several…
Eukaryote cells have a flexible shape, which dynamically changes according to the function performed by the cell. One mechanism for deforming the cell membrane into the desired shape is through the expression of curved membrane proteins.…
We study an elasticity model for compressed protein monolayers or particle rafts at a liquid interface. Based on the microscopic view of hard-core particles with soft shells, a bead-spring model is formulated and analyzed in terms of…
We consider a family of linearly elastic shells with thickness $2\varepsilon$ (where $\varepsilon$ is a small parameter). The shells are clamped along a portion of their lateral face, all having the same middle surface $S$, and may enter in…
Viruses are biological nanosystems with a capsid of protein-made capsomer units that encloses and protects the genetic material responsible for their replication. Here we show how the geometrical constraints of the capsomer-capsomer…
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…
Simple RNA viruses self-assemble spontaneously and encapsulate their genome into a shell called the capsid. This process is mainly driven by the attractive electrostatic interaction between the positive charges on capsid proteins and the…