Role of reversibility in viral capsid growth: A paradigm for self-assembly

Abstract

Self-assembly at submicroscopic scales is an important but little understood phenomenon. A prominent example is virus capsid growth, whose underlying behavior can be modeled using simple particles that assemble into polyhedral shells. Molecular dynamics simulation of shell formation in the presence of an atomistic solvent provides new insight into the self-assembly mechanism, notably that growth proceeds via a cascade of strongly reversible steps and, despite the large variety of possible intermediates, only a small fraction of highly bonded forms appear on the pathway.

4 pages, 4 figures (slightly shorter version, new Fig.2); further minor changes

References in corpus (2)

• Virus shapes and buckling transitions in spherical shells
• Stochastic kinetics of viral capsid assembly based on detailed protein structures

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Mechanisms of virus assembly
• Equilibrium mechanisms of self-limiting assembly
• Limiting the valence: advancements and new perspectives on patchy colloids, soft functionalized nanoparticles and biomolecules
• A theory for viral capsid assembly around electrostatic cores
• Stochastic dynamics of virus capsid formation: direct versus hierarchical self-assembly
• The dynamics of viruslike capsid assembly and disassembly
• The self-assembly of DNA Holliday junctions studied with a minimal model
• Studying protein assembly with reversible Brownian dynamics of patchy particles
• Role of dynamic capsomere supply for viral capsid self-assembly
• Molecular dynamics simulation: a tool for exploration and discovery using simple models
• Rapid prediction of crucial hotspot interactions for icosahedral viral capsid self-assembly by energy landscape atlasing validated by mutagenesis
• 2D capsid formation within an oscillatory energy landscape: orderly self-assembly depends on the interplay between a dynamic potential and intrinsic relaxation times
• Virus Assembly on a Membrane is Facilitated by Membrane Microdomains
• Pathways for virus assembly around nucleic acids
• The role of packaging sites in efficient and specific virus assembly