Virus Structure: From Crick and Watson to a New Conjecture

We conjecture that certain patterns (scars), theoretically and numerically predicted to be formed by electrons arranged on a sphere to minimize the repulsive Coulomb potential (the Thomson problem) and experimentally found in spherical crystals formed by self-assembled polystyrene beads (an instance of the generalized Thomson problem), could be relevant to extend the classic Caspar and Klug construction for icosahedrally-shaped virus capsids. The main idea is that scars could be produced at an intermediate stage of the assembly of the virus capsids and the release of the bending energy present in scars into stretching energy could allow for a variety of non-spherical capsids’ shapes. The conjecture can be tested in experiments on the assembly of artificial protein-cages where these scars should appear. ∗ Invited talk by A.I. at the Fourth International Summer School and Workshop on Nuclear Physics Methods and Accelerators in Biology and Medicine Prague, 8-19 July 2007. PACS: 87.10.+e, 87.15.Kg, 61.72.-y