Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 116, Issue 45, Pages 22485-22490Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1909223116
Keywords
self-assembly; RNA virus; kinetics; nucleation and growth; single particle
Categories
Funding
- Harvard Materials Research Science and Engineering Center under National Science Foundation (NSF) [DMR-1420570]
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship [DGE-1144152]
- National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health [K99GM127751]
- NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical and Statistical Analysis of Biology at Harvard University [1764269]
- Harvard Quantitative Biology Initiative
- NSF [1541959]
- Division Of Mathematical Sciences
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [1764269] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Self-assembly is widely used by biological systems to build functional nanostructures, such as the protein capsids of RNA viruses. But because assembly is a collective phenomenon involving many weakly interacting subunits and a broad range of timescales, measurements of the assembly pathways have been elusive. We use interferometric scattering microscopy to measure the assembly kinetics of individual MS2 bacteriophage capsids around MS2 RNA. By recording how many coat proteins bind to each of many individual RNA strands, we find that assembly proceeds by nucleation followed by monotonic growth. Our measurements reveal the assembly pathways in quantitative detail and also show their failure modes. We use these results to critically examine models of the assembly process.
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