Provitam Foundation, Department of Research and Development, Sfântu Gheorghe, Romania; University of Pécs, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Sciences, Pécs, Hungary.
Prog Mol Biol Transl Sci. 2020;170:405-434. doi: 10.1016/bs.pmbts.2019.12.003. Epub 2019 Dec 20.
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.
病毒衣壳由多个衣壳蛋白自组装形成，这是一个令人着迷的超分子自组装过程的例子。大多数已知的病毒都用二十面体衣壳来保护其基因组，但也存在其他形态，包括长形、锥形、管状、头-尾结构。组装的机制可能多种多样，目前仍不完全清楚。在本章中，我们介绍了多年来开发的理论模型，这些模型再现了空病毒衣壳自组装的基本物理过程。所有这些模型都是高度粗粒化的，因为目前还不可能用原子建模来获得这种过程的长时间尺度。非常不同的基于粒子的模型可以产生相同的整体行为，这表明这些过程是由蛋白质构建块之间的有效各向异性相互作用控制的。
