Kinetics of viral self-assembly: the role of ss RNA antenna

Abstract

A big class of viruses self-assemble from a large number of identical capsid proteins with long flexible N-terminal tails and ss RNA. We study the role of the strong Coulomb interaction of positive N-terminal tails with ss RNA in the kinetics of the in vitro virus self-assembly. Capsid proteins stick to unassembled chain of ss RNA (which we call "antenna") and slide on it towards the assembly site. We show that at excess of capsid proteins such one-dimensional diffusion accelerates self-assembly more than ten times. On the other hand at excess of ss RNA, antenna slows self-assembly down. Several experiments are proposed to verify the role of ss RNA antenna.

4 pages, 3 figures, several experiments are proposed, a new idea of experiment is added

References in corpus (1)

• Kinetics of protein-DNA interaction: facilitated target location in sequence-dependent potential

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• A theory for viral capsid assembly around electrostatic cores
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• Radial distribution of RNA genome packaged inside spherical viruses
• Design principles of transcription factors with intrinsically disordered regions
• The role of packaging sites in efficient and specific virus assembly
• Pathways for virus assembly around nucleic acids