engleski

Influence of energetics of protein contacts on polydispersity of assembled empty virus capsids in thermodynamical equilibrium

I shall present some of the results of ongoing work on energetics of viruses. The emphasis will be on the spontaneous assembly of empty viruses (capsids) that is in many cases known to produce rather monodisperse samples (HIV virus is a prominent exception). For example, the capsid of hepatitis B virus assembles correctly in 90 % of cases, and the remaining 10 % are abberant capsids that have the symmetry typical of viruses, which is of the wrong order (or T-number), however. In this work we concentrate on the entropic and enthalpic contribution to the free energy of the assembly and we discuss whether the spontaneous curvature of virus capsids may be a decisive factor that guides the assembly towards correct structures. We determine the numerical values of the spontaneous curvature that are needed in order to guarantee monodispersity of the assembled capsids.

virus; assembly; equilibrium; protein

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