Elucidating chirality transfer in liquid crystals of viruses.

Autor: Grelet E; Centre de Recherche Paul Pascal (CRPP, UMR 5031), Univ. Bordeaux, CNRS, Pessac, France. eric.grelet@crpp.cnrs.fr., Tortora MMC; Laboratoire de Biologie et Modélisation de la Cellule (LBMC, UMR 5239, Inserm 1293), Univ. Claude Bernard Lyon 1, ENS de Lyon, CNRS, Lyon, France. tortora@usc.edu.; Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA. tortora@usc.edu.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Nature materials [Nat Mater] 2024 Sep; Vol. 23 (9), pp. 1276-1282. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 May 23.
DOI: 10.1038/s41563-024-01897-x
Abstrakt: Chirality is ubiquitous in nature across all length scales, with major implications spanning fields from biology, chemistry and physics to materials science. How chirality propagates from nanoscale building blocks to meso- and macroscopic helical structures remains an open issue. Here, working with a canonical system of filamentous viruses, we demonstrate that their self-assembly into chiral liquid crystal phases quantitatively results from the interplay between two main mechanisms of chirality transfer: electrostatic interactions from the helical charge patterns on the virus surface, and fluctuation-based helical deformations leading to viral backbone helicity. Our experimental and theoretical approach provides a comprehensive framework for deciphering how chirality is hierarchically and quantitatively propagated across spatial scales. Our work highlights the ways in which supramolecular helicity may arise from subtle chiral contributions of opposite handedness that act either cooperatively or competitively, thus accounting for the multiplicity of chiral behaviours observed for nearly identical molecular systems.
(© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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