Watching viruses form, one virus at a time

ORAL  · Invited

Abstract

Simple viruses consist of RNA and proteins that form an icosahedral shell (called a capsid) that protects the RNA. Many simple viruses are self-assembled: mixing the RNA and the capsid proteins in a test tube leads to spontaneous formation of infectious viruses in high yield. This result suggests that we can understand RNA virus self-assembly from the perspective of statistical physics. The central question is how a random process like self-assembly can lead to a high yield of well-formed viruses. I will discuss some potential answers to that question based on experiments that measure the kinetics of assembly of individual viruses.

*This work is supported by the Harvard Materials Research Science and Engineering Center under National Science Foundation (NSF) Grants DMR-1420570 and DMR-2011754; the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant DGE-1144152; the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Grant K99GM127751; the NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical and Statistical Analysis of Biology at Harvard University under Grant 1764269; and the Harvard Quantitative Biology Initiative. This work was performed in part at the Harvard Center for Nanoscale Systems, supported by NSF Grant 1541959.

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Publication: Garmann, Rees F., Aaron M. Goldfain, and Vinothan N. Manoharan. "Measurements of the Self-Assembly Kinetics of Individual Viral Capsids around Their RNA Genome." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 45 (September 30, 2019): 22485–90. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1909223116.

Goldfain, Aaron M., Rees F. Garmann, Cheylene R. Tanimoto, Christian E. Beren, Charles M. Knobler, William M. Gelbart, and Vinothan N. Manoharan. "Single-Particle Studies of the Effects of Ionic Strength and Protein Concentration on the Self-Assembly of RNA Virus Particles," preprint

Presenters

  • Vinothan N Manoharan

    • Harvard University

Authors

  • Vinothan N Manoharan

    • Harvard University