Elasticity of viruses (25th of May 2013)
For some time already I am trying to extract some information on the evolution of viruses from my studies on physical properties of viruses.
These attempts of mine have had only a limited success thus far. From the investigations of charge distributions and electrostatics of
viruses it was difficult to extract some universal conclusions, as can be seen in >>
the paper published last year.
>> A recently published paper represents a continuation of these
efforts and it aimed at finding possible universal characteristics of elasticity of virus capsids, i.e. universality in protein-protein
interactions in virus coatings. Here we again had only limited success, although the results perhaps indicate some "evolutionary convergence"
of the properties of virus proteins; it's difficult to say.
In any case, >> the results are HERE so you be the judge.
With respect to the techniques of scientific visualization used, these were already discussed on the pages of "Construction of Reality".
The image above shows the comparison of the shape of a real virus (brome mosaic virus; left) and an elastic shell modeling the virus shape.
Such comparisons should be performed only on sufficiently large viruses, and one can see that from our data also, since the notable
convergence of the elastic properties can be seen only in case of large viruses.
The method we used to assign a particular elastic shell to each of the viruses from the data bases is also interesting. To this end,
Anže developed a special routine in order to quantitatively compare the real virus with the set of "prototype" elastic shells
shown in the image above. For one of these shells, the routine typically predicts the smallest deviation from the shape of the
real virus, so we used the analysis to conclude on the elastic properties of virus capsids.
The elastic shells are the result of a Fortran code whose output was visualized in POV-Ray (the image below) and colored in accordance
with the elastic energy of particular regions in the shell. I spoke about this particular implementation recently in
>> lectures on scientific visualization, part 4.
| << Introduction to scientific visualization 4 | Soft disks in contact >> |
Last updated on 25th of May 2013.