Minimalistic coarse-grained modeling of viral capsid assembly

Abstract

The spontaneous formation of virus capsids from multiple copies of capsid proteins is a fascinating example of supramolecular self-assembling processes. Most known viruses protect their genome with icosahedral capsids, but other morphologies exist as well, including elongated, conical, tubular, head-tail structures. The mechanisms of assembly can be diverse and are still not perfectly understood. In this chapter we present theoretical models developed over the years that reproduce the basic physics of self-assembly of empty viral capsids. All these models are highly coarse-grained, as it is still not possible to access the long timescales of such processes with atomistic modeling. Very different particle-based models can result in the same overall behavior, showing that such processes are governed by the effective anisotropic interactions between protein building blocks.

Keywords: Energy landscapes; Minimalistic modeling; Self-assembly; Virus capsids.