Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife 50670-901, Brazil.
Phys Rev E. 2016 Dec;94(6-1):062406. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.94.062406. Epub 2016 Dec 19.
The packing of a genome in virions is a topic of intense current interest in biology and biological physics. The area is dominated by allometric scaling relations that connect, e.g., the length of the encapsulated genome and the size of the corresponding virion capsid. Here we report scaling laws obtained from extensive experiments of packing of a macroscopic wire within rigid three-dimensional spherical and nonspherical cavities that can shed light on the details of the genome packing in virions. We show that these results obtained with crumpled wires are comparable to those from a large compilation of biological data from several classes of virions.
病毒粒子中基因组的包装是生物学和生物物理学中当前热门的研究课题。该领域主要由异速缩放关系主导，这些关系将包裹的基因组长度与相应的病毒衣壳大小等因素联系起来。在这里，我们报告了通过在刚性三维球形和非球形腔体内包装宏观金属线的广泛实验得出的缩放定律，这些定律可以揭示病毒粒子中基因组包装的细节。我们表明，这些通过褶皱金属线获得的结果与来自几类病毒粒子的大量生物学数据的综合结果相当。
