Related papers: Mechanical limits of viral capsids
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…
A simple model is proposed aimed to investigate how the amount of dissociated ions influences the mechanical stability of viral capsids. After an osmotic and mechanical equilibrium is established with the outer solution, a non-adiabatic…
Nanoindentation of viral capsids provides an efficient tool in order to probe their elastic properties. We investigate in the present work the various sources of stiffness heterogeneity as observed in Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM)…
Physical properties of capsids of plant and animal viruses are important factors in capsid self-assembly, survival of viruses in the extracellular environment, and their cell infectivity. Virus shells can have applications as nanocontainers…
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…
We model the spontaneous assembly of a capsid (a virus's closed outer shell) from many copies of identical units, using entirely irreversible steps and only information local to the growing edge. Our model is formulated in terms of (i) an…
I present a review of the theoretical and computational methodologies that have been used to model the assembly of viral capsids. I discuss the capabilities and limitations of approaches ranging from equilibrium continuum theories to…
In this work we study how a viral capsid can change conformation using techniques of Large Deviations Theory for stochastic differential equations. The viral capsid is a model of a complex system in which many units - the proteins forming…
The coat proteins of many viruses spontaneously form icosahedral capsids around nucleic acids or other polymers. Elucidating the role of the packaged polymer in capsid formation could promote biomedical efforts to block viral replication…
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…
Understanding the fracture mechanics of soft solids remains a fundamental challenge due to their complex, nonlinear responses under large deformations. While multiaxial loading is key to probing their mechanical behavior, the role of such…
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…
Using large scale numerical simulations we analyze the statistical properties of fracture in the two dimensional random spring model and compare it with its scalar counterpart: the random fuse model. We first consider the process of crack…
We consider self-assembly of proteins into a virus capsid by the methods of molecular dynamics. The capsid corresponds either to SPMV or CCMV and is studied with and without the RNA molecule inside. The proteins are flexible and described…
We develop a clear theoretical description of radial swelling in virus-like particles which delineates the importance of electrostatic contributions to swelling in absence of any conformational changes. The model couples the elastic…
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…
Recently, continuum elasticity theory has been applied to explain the shape transition of icosahedral viral capsids - single-protein-thick crystalline shells - from spherical to buckled/faceted as their radius increases through a critical…
The capillary forces exerted by liquid drops and bubbles on a soft solid are directly measured using molecular dynamics simulations. The force on the solid by the liquid near the contact line is not oriented along the liquid vapor interface…
Elastic curvature constants determine many structural and functional properties of fluid membranes. Methods to measure the mean curvature modulus have proved to be robust. In contrast, Gaussian curvature is an intrinsic property of a…
Capsids of many viruses assemble around nucleic acids or other polymers. Understanding how the properties of the packaged polymer affect the assembly process could promote biomedical efforts to prevent viral assembly or nanomaterials…