Polymer packaging and ejection in viral capsids: shape matters

Abstract

We use a mesoscale simulation approach to explore the impact of different capsid geometries on the packaging and ejection dynamics of polymers of different flexibility. We find that both packing and ejection times are faster for flexible polymers. For such polymers a sphere packs more quickly and ejects more slowly than an ellipsoid. For semiflexible polymers, however, the case relevant to DNA, a sphere both packs and ejects more easily. We interpret our results by considering both the thermodynamics and the relaxational dynamics of the polymers. The predictions could be tested with bio-mimetic experiments with synthetic polymers inside artificial vesicles. Our results suggest that phages may have evolved to be roughly spherical in shape to optimise the speed of genome ejection, which is the first stage in infection.

4 pages, 4 figures

Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Knot-controlled ejection of a polymer from a virus capsid
• Semiflexible Polymer Confined in Closed Spaces
• Dynamics of Polymer Decompression: Expansion, Unfolding and Ejection
• DNA ejection from bacteriophage: towards a general behavior for osmotic suppression experiments