Effects of RNA branching on the electrostatic stabilization of viruses

Abstract

Many single-stranded (ss) RNA viruses self assemble from capsid protein subunits and the nucleic acid to form an infectious virion. It is believed that the electrostatic interactions between the negatively charged RNA and the positively charged viral capsid proteins drive the encapsidation, although there is growing evidence that the sequence of the viral RNA also plays a role in packaging. In particular the sequence will determine the possible secondary structures that the ssRNA will take in solution. In this work, we use a mean field theory to investigate how the secondary structure of the RNA combined with electrostatic interactions affects the efficiency of assembly and stability of the assembled virions. We show that the secondary structure of RNA may result in negative osmotic pressures while a linear polymer causes positive osmotic pressures for the same conditions. This may suggest that the branched structure makes the RNA more effectively packaged and the virion more stable.

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Impact of a non-uniform charge distribution on virus assembly
• The effect of RNA stiffness on the self-assembly of virus particles
• RNA Base Pairing Determines the Conformations of RNA Inside Spherical Viruses
• Electrostatics-driven inflation of elastic icosahedral shells as a model for radial swelling of virus-like particles
• Effect of the charge distribution of virus coat proteins on the length of packaged RNAs
• Varieties of charge distributions in coat proteins of ssRNA+ viruses
• Self Consistent Field Theory of Virus Assembly
• Scaling properties of RNA as a randomly branching polymer
• Electrostatic inactivation of RNA viruses at air-water and liquid-liquid interfaces
• Molecular dynamics characterization of the free and encapsidated RNA2 of CCMV with the oxRNA model
• Viral RNA as a branched polymer
• Normalized topological indices discriminate between architectures of branched macromolecules