2007/03/14 by Mathias Buenemann, Peter Lenz · 1 citation
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Environmental Science · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Bacteriophages and microbial interactions #Plant Virus Research Studies #Viral gastroenteritis research and epidemiology #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #cond-mat.soft #q-bio.BM
paper · pdf · doi:10.1073/pnas.0611472104
6 pages, 9 figures
arxiv created 2007/03/14 · openalex publication_date 2007/06/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We studied the elastic properties and mechanical stability of viral capsids under external force-loading with computer simulations. Our approach allows the implementation of specific geometries corresponding to specific phages, such as phi29 and cowpea chlorotic mottle virus. We demonstrate how, in a combined numerical and experimental approach, the elastic parameters can be determined with high precision. The experimentally observed bimodality of elastic spring constants is shown to be of geometrical origin, namely the presence of pentavalent units in the viral shell. We define a criterion for capsid breakage that explains well the experimentally observed rupture. From our numerics we find a crossover from gamma(2/3) to gamma(1/2) for the dependence of the rupture force on the Föppl-von Kármán number, gamma. For filled capsids, high internal pressures lead to a stronger destabilization for viruses with buckled ground states versus viruses with unbuckled ground states. Finally, we show how our numerically calculated energy maps can be used to extract information about the strength of protein-protein interactions from rupture experiments.