Статья

Survival of virus particles in water droplets: Hydrophobic forces and landauer’s principle

E. Bormashenko, A. Fedorets, L. Dombrovsky, M. Nosonovsky,
2021

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-pro-cessing mechanism. We further showed a similarity of these submicron-scale processes with the self-assembly in colloidal crystals, droplet clusters, and liquid marbles. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

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  • 1. Version of Record от 2021-04-27

Метаданные

Об авторах
  • E. Bormashenko
    Department of Chemical Engineering, Biotechnology and Materials, Engineering Science Faculty, Ariel University, Ariel, 40700, Israel
  • A. Fedorets
    X-BIO Institute, University of Tyumen, 6 Volodarskogo St, Tyumen, 625003, Russian Federation
  • L. Dombrovsky
    Joint Institute for High Temperatures, 17A Krasnokazarmennaya St, Moscow, 111116, Russian Federation
  • M. Nosonovsky
    Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, 3200 North Сramer St, Milwaukee, WI 53211, United States
Название журнала
  • Entropy
Том
  • 23
Выпуск
  • 2
Страницы
  • 1-12
Издатель
  • MDPI AG
Тип документа
  • journal article
Тип лицензии Creative Commons
  • CC
Правовой статус документа
  • Свободная лицензия
Источник
  • scopus