2025/11/20 by Félix Benoist, Pablo Sartori, Benoist, Félix +1
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Environmental Science · Materials Science · #Bacteriophages and microbial interactions #Block Copolymer Self-Assembly #Protein Structure and Dynamics #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.16362
openalex publication_date 2025/11/20 · openalex created_date 2025/11/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The cytoplasm is a heterogeneous mixture containing many types of proteins that self-assemble into a wide variety of complexes. The accuracy and speed of cytoplasmic self-assembly is astonishing because it involves the correct identification of components shared among different structures, despite pervasive thermal fluctuations. Typical toy models of self-assembly are based on the specificity of binding energies among components. However, kinetics plays a key role in biological self-assembly, often catalyzed by a plethora of assembly factors. Building on this observation, we extend a previous heteropolymer growth model to describe the retrieval of two-dimensional structures via quasi-2D growth. We find that the self-assembly of structures in this model is subject to strong speed and encoding bottlenecks. Moreover, we show that these bottlenecks can be suppressed by increasing the connectivity of a small fraction of components. This mechanism of kinetically controlling a small number of critical binding events provides a simple explanation for the timely assembly of large protein, and suggests a unifying principle for the role of assembly factors.