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May 26 – 31, 2024
Western University
America/Toronto timezone
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(POS-67) Frustrated Self-Assembly

May 28, 2024, 6:05 PM
2m
PAB Hallways (Western University)

PAB Hallways

Western University

Poster (Non-Student) / Affiche (Non-étudiant(e)) Condensed Matter and Materials Physics / Physique de la matière condensée et matériaux (DCMMP-DPMCM) DCMMP Poster Session & Student Poster Competition (11) | Session d'affiches DPMCM et concours d'affiches étudiantes (11)

Speaker

Dr Andrey Zelenskiy (Laboratory of Theoretical Physics and Statistical Models (LPTMS))

Description

Biomolecular self-assembly lies at the very heart of the function of living cells, where it organizes individual components into functional biological machines. The macromolecular sub-units typically correspond to proteins, whose shapes have been optimized over millions of years of evolution to ensure a proper functionality of the self-assembled structures. However, in pathological cases, proteins fail to achieve the optimal folding, which often leads to complex ill-fitting shapes. This produces geometrical incompatibility, which leads to frustrated interactions between the sub-units. Surprisingly, despite a huge variability in protein structure, such misfolded units tend to robustly self-assemble into aggregates with well-defined morphologies. Interestingly, these structures display a clear preference for slimmer topologies, such as fiber aggregates. This emergent principle of dimensionality reduction suggests that the aggregation of irregular components derives from the generic physical principles, rather than the microscopic details of the interactions.

Inspired by this idea, we model the frustrated self-assembly of ill-shaped proteins as coarse-grained anisotropic particles, whose interactions depend on their relative orientations and positions in space. This simple model successfully reproduces a hierarchy of aggregate morphologies and gives pointers to the origins of dimensionality reduction.

Keyword-1 self-assembly
Keyword-2 frustration
Keyword-3 statistical models

Primary author

Dr Lara Koehler (Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems)

Co-authors

Dr Martin Lenz (Laboratory of Theoretical Physics and Statistical Models (LPTMS)) Dr Pierre Ronceray (Turing Center for Living Systems)

Presentation materials

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