title: Group theory of icosahedral virus capsid vibrations: a top-down approach.
abstract: We explore the use of a top-down approach to analyse the dynamics of icosahedral virus capsids and complement the information obtained from bottom-up studies of viral vibrations available in the literature. A normal mode analysis based on protein association energies is used to study the frequency spectrum, in which we reveal a universal plateau of low-frequency modes shared by a large class of Caspar-Klug capsids. These modes break icosahedral symmetry and are potentially relevant to the genome release mechanism. We comment on the role of viral tiling theory in such dynamical considerations.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Theoretical Physics, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80.195, 3508 TD Utrecht, The Netherlands. kasper.peeters@aei.mpg.de
authors.forename: Kasper
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Peeters
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Taormina
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002213:Capsid / Q000737:chemistry*; D036022:Capsid Proteins / Q000737:chemistry; D008954:Models, Biological; D011487:Protein Conformation; D014732:Vibration; D019065:Virus Assembly / Q000502:physiology
chemical_list: D036022:Capsid Proteins