title: Scaling, crumpled wires, and genome packing in virions.
abstract: The packing of a genome in virions is a topic of intense current interest in biology and biological physics. The area is dominated by allometric scaling relations that connect, e.g., the length of the encapsulated genome and the size of the corresponding virion capsid. Here we report scaling laws obtained from extensive experiments of packing of a macroscopic wire within rigid three-dimensional spherical and nonspherical cavities that can shed light on the details of the genome packing in virions. We show that these results obtained with crumpled wires are comparable to those from a large compilation of biological data from several classes of virions.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife 50670-901, Brazil.
authors.forename: V H
authors.initials: VH
authors.lastname: de Holanda
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife 50670-901, Brazil.
authors.forename: M A F
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Gomes
mesh_terms: D002213:Capsid / Q000378:metabolism; D036022:Capsid Proteins / Q000378:metabolism; D016679:Genome, Viral; D008954:Models, Biological; D014771:Virion / Q000502:physiology*
chemical_list: D036022:Capsid Proteins