Modeling the dynamics of viral capsid assembly

描述（由申请人提供）：病毒蛋白在许多不同的生物体和环境中快速和可复制地组装成衣壳。该项目旨在确定蛋白质-蛋白质相互作用的哪些特征是这种强大的组装所必需的。确定稳健组装的要求可以在抗病毒策略以及基因治疗病毒载体的开发中发挥关键作用。更重要的是，将基本单位组织成定义明确的大尺度结构对许多生物系统来说是不可或缺的。因此，在一个相对简单的系统（如病毒衣壳）的基础水平上理解组装，可能在整个生物学中有广泛的应用。为了在描述大规模组装过程时捕获单个蛋白质的基本细节，提出了一种模拟和理论方法的层次结构。每个层次的理论努力都与探索相同现象的实验相结合。这一努力被看作是在装配过程中系统粗粒度化通用算法发展的跳板。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Viral proteins assemble into capsids rapidly and reproducibly in many different organisms and environments. This project is designed to determine what features of protein-protein interactions are required for such robust assembly. Identifying the requirements for robust assembly could play a critical role in antiviral strategies as well as in the development of viral vectors for gene therapy. More significantly, organization of basic units into well defined, large scale structures is integral to many biological systems. Hence, understanding assembly at a fundamental level for a relatively simple system, such as a virus capsid, could have broad applications throughout biology. In order to capture essential details of individual proteins while describing large scale assembly processes, a hierarchy of simulations and theoretical methods is proposed. The theoretical efforts at each level are coupled to experiments that probe the same phenomena. This endeavor is viewed as a springboard for the development of a general algorithm for systematically coarse-graining in assembly processes.