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Updated: Feb 22, 2026

Simple and Robust in vivo and in vitro Approach for Studying Virus Assembly
Published on: March 1, 2012
Impact of a nonuniform charge distribution on virus assembly
Siyu Li1, Gonca Erdemci-Tandogan1, Jef Wagner1
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Riverside, California 92521, USA.
Abstract:
Many spherical viruses encapsulate their genomes in protein shells with icosahedral symmetry. This process is spontaneous and driven by electrostatic interactions between positive domains on the virus coat proteins and the negative genomes. We model the effect of the nonuniform icosahedral charge distribution from the protein shell instead using a mean-field theory. We find that this nonuniform charge distribution strongly affects the optimal genome length and that it can explain the experimentally observed phenomenon of overcharging of virus and viruslike particles.
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