Entropic control of particle sizes during viral self-assembly

Morphologic diversity is observed across all families of viruses. However, these supra-molecular assemblies are produced most of the time in a spontaneous way through complex molecular self-assembly scenarios. The modeling of these phenomena remains a challenging problem within the emerging field of physical virology. We present in this work a theoretical analysis aiming at highlighting the particular role of configuration entropy in the control of viral particle size distribution. Specializing this model to retroviruses such as HIV-1, we predict a new mechanism of entropic control of both RNA uptake into the viral particle and of the particle's size distribution. Evidence of this peculiar behavior has recently been reported experimentally.