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Updated: Feb 17, 2026

Generation and Assembly of Virus-Specific Nucleocapsids of the Respiratory Syncytial Virus
Published on: July 27, 2021
The effect of RNA stiffness on the self-assembly of virus particles
Siyu Li1, Gonca Erdemci-Tandogan2, Paul van der Schoot3,4
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, United States of America.
Abstract:
Under many in vitro conditions, some small viruses spontaneously encapsidate a single stranded (ss) RNA into a protein shell called the capsid. While viral RNAs are found to be compact and highly branched because of long distance base-pairing between nucleotides, recent experiments reveal that in a head-to-head competition between an ssRNA with no secondary or higher order structure and a viral RNA, the capsid proteins preferentially encapsulate the linear polymer! In this paper, we study the impact of genome stiffness on the encapsidation free energy of the complex of RNA and capsid proteins. We show that an increase in effective chain stiffness because of base-pairing could be the reason why under certain conditions linear chains have an advantage over branched chains when it comes to encapsidation efficiency. While branching makes the genome more compact, RNA base-pairing increases the effective Kuhn length of the RNA molecule, which could result in an increase of the free energy of RNA confinement, that is, the work required to encapsidate RNA, and thus less efficient packaging.
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