%0 Journal Article
%T Group theory of icosahedral virus capsids: a dynamical top-down approach
%A Kasper Peeters
%A Anne Taormina
%J Quantitative Biology
%D 2008
%I arXiv
%R 10.1016/j.jtbi.2008.10.019
%X 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.
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.1029v1