Physics and Astronomy Calendar

We explore the role played by the Coulomb interaction between the brush of positive N-terminal tails rooted at the inner surface of the capsid and the negative ss RNA molecule. In the first part of the talk we show that viruses are most stable when the total length of ss RNA is close to the total length of the tails. For such a structure the absolute value of total (negative) charge of ss RNA is approximately twice larger than the charge of the capsid. This conclusion agrees with available structural data.

The second part of the talk deals with the role of the strong Coulomb protein-RNA interaction in the kinetics of the virus elf-assembly. Capsid proteins stick to unassembled chain of ss RNA (which we call "antenna") and slide on it towards the self-assembly site. We show that due to such one-dimensional diffusion in an excess of proteins the virus self-assembly is more than ten times faster than the case involving only three-dimensional diffusion. In an excess of RNA the protein –RNA attraction leads to the opposite effect of kinetic trapping and slows down the assembly. We propose several experiments which are able to verify the predicted role of RNA antenna.