Journal
JOURNAL OF PHYSICS-CONDENSED MATTER
Volume 22, Issue 10, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/0953-8984/22/10/104101
Keywords
-
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We use computer simulations to study a model, first proposed by Wales (2005 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 363 357), for the reversible and monodisperse self-assembly of simple icosahedral virus capsid structures. The success and efficiency of assembly as a function of thermodynamic and geometric factors can be qualitatively related to the potential energy landscape structure of the assembling system. Even though the model is strongly coarse-grained, it exhibits a number of features also observed in experiments, such as sigmoidal assembly dynamics, hysteresis in capsid formation and numerous kinetic traps. We also investigate the effect of macromolecular crowding on the assembly dynamics. Crowding agents generally reduce capsid yields at optimal conditions for non-crowded assembly, but may increase yields for parameter regimes away from the optimum. Finally, we generalize the model to a larger triangulation number T = 3, and observe assembly dynamics more complex than that seen for the original T = 1 model.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available