2006/05/26 by I. Ali, Davide Marenduzzo, D. Marenduzzo +2 · 1 citation
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Bacteriophages and microbial interactions #Plant Virus Research Studies #Protein Structure and Dynamics #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.96.208102
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 208102 (2006) · 4 pages, 4 figures
openalex publication_date 2006/05/26 · arxiv created 2006/06/20 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We use a mesoscale simulation approach to explore the impact of different capsid geometries on the packaging and ejection dynamics of polymers of different flexibility. We find that both packing and ejection times are faster for flexible polymers. For such polymers a sphere packs more quickly and ejects more slowly than an ellipsoid. For semiflexible polymers, however, the case relevant to DNA, a sphere both packs and ejects more easily. We interpret our results by considering both the thermodynamics and the relaxational dynamics of the polymers. The predictions could be tested with biomimetic experiments with synthetic polymers inside artificial vesicles. Our results suggest that phages may have evolved to be roughly spherical in shape to optimize the speed of genome ejection, which is the first stage in infection.