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- Title
Survival of Virus Particles in Water Droplets: Hydrophobic Forces and Landauer's Principle.
- Authors
Bormashenko, Edward; Fedorets, Alexander A.; Dombrovsky, Leonid A.; Nosonovsky, Michael
- Abstract
Many small biological objects, such as viruses, survive in a water environment and cannot remain active in dry air without condensation of water vapor. From a physical point of view, these objects belong to the mesoscale, where small thermal fluctuations with the characteristic kinetic energy of kBT (where kB is the Boltzmann's constant and T is the absolute temperature) play a significant role. The self-assembly of viruses, including protein folding and the formation of a protein capsid and lipid bilayer membrane, is controlled by hydrophobic forces (i.e., the repulsing forces between hydrophobic particles and regions of molecules) in a water environment. Hydrophobic forces are entropic, and they are driven by a system's tendency to attain the maximum disordered state. On the other hand, in information systems, entropic forces are responsible for erasing information, if the energy barrier between two states of a switch is on the order of kBT, which is referred to as Landauer's principle. We treated hydrophobic interactions responsible for the self-assembly of viruses as an information-processing mechanism. We further showed a similarity of these submicron-scale processes with the self-assembly in colloidal crystals, droplet clusters, and liquid marbles.
- Subjects
BILAYER lipid membranes; BOLTZMANN'S constant; COLLOIDAL crystals; PROTEIN folding; HYDROPHOBIC interactions
- Publication
Entropy, 2021, Vol 23, Issue 2, p181
- ISSN
1099-4300
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3390/e23020181