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Updated: Jul 8, 2026

Simple and Robust in vivo and in vitro Approach for Studying Virus Assembly
Published on: March 1, 2012
Kinetic theory of virus capsid assembly
Paul van der Schoot1, Roya Zandi
1Department of Applied Physics, Eindhoven University of Technology, POB 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Abstract:
A phenomenological theory is presented for the kinetics of the in vitro assembly and disassembly of icosahedral virus capsids in solutions of coat proteins. The focus is on conditions where nucleation-type processes can be ignored. We find that the kinetics of assembly is strongly concentration dependent and that the late-stage relaxation time varies as the inverse of the square of the concentration. These findings are corroborated by experimental observations on a number of viruses. Further, our theory shows that hysteresis observed in some experiments could be a direct effect of the kinetics of a high-order mass action law, not necessarily the result of a free energy barrier between assembled and disassembled states.
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