Braided bundles and compact coils: The structure and thermodynamics of hexagonally packed chiral filament assemblies

Molecular chirality frustrates the two-dimensional assembly of filamentous molecules, a fact that reflects the generic impossibility of imposing a global twisting of layered materials. We explore the consequences of this frustration for hexagonally ordered assemblies of chiral filaments that are finite in lateral dimension. Specifically, we employ a continuum-elastic description of cylindrical bundles of filaments, allowing us to consider the most general resistance to and preference for chiral ordering of the assembly. We explore two distinct mechanisms by which chirality at the molecular scale of the filament frustrates the assembly into aggregates. In the first, chiral interactions between filaments impart an overall twisting of filaments around the central axis of the bundle. In the second, we consider filaments that are inherently helical in structure, imparting a writhing geometry to the central axis. For both mechanisms, we find that a thermodynamically stable state of dispersed bundles of finite width appears close to but below the point of bulk filament condensation. The range of thermodynamic stability of dispersed bundles is sensitive only to the elastic cost and preference for chiral filament packing. The self-limited assembly of chiral filaments has particular implications for a large class of biological molecules-DNA, filamentous proteins, viruses, and bacterial flagella-which are universally chiral and are observed to form compact bundles under a broad range of conditions.