Northwestern Events Calendar

Apr
27
2015

Professor Vinothan Manoharan - How does a virus self-assemble?

When: Monday, April 27, 2015
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM CT

Where: Technological Institute, M416, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public

Contact: Beth Siculan   (847) 491-3345

Group: McCormick-Colloquia Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Title: How does a virus self-assemble?

Speaker: Professor Vinothan Manoharan, Harvard University

Abstract: I don't know the answer to the question posed in the title, but I will try to show that it is an interesting problem. Simple viruses consist of RNA and proteins that form a shell (called a capsid) that protects the RNA. The capsid is highly ordered, the proteins being arranged in an icosahedral shell. Many such viruses can self-assemble: you can mix the RNA and the capsid proteins in a test tube, and they will spontaneously form infectious viruses (don't worry -- none of the viruses I will discuss will infect you, unless you are a plant or bacterium). To understand how this self-assembly process happens, we do experiments on a much larger, model system: attractive colloidal particles on the surface of a sphere. On the curved droplet surface, the particles form branched networks of slender domains, a consequence of an elastic instability. These results show that Gaussian curvature can fundamentally alter the growth and shape of ordered domains, which suggests that the viral assembly pathway may be anything but trivial. I will conclude by showing new optical experiments that attempt to resolve the kinetics of assembly of a single viral capsid.

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