Work

Survival of Virus Particles in Water Droplets: Hydrophobic Forces and Landauer’s Principle

Year: 2021

Type: article

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.

Source: Entropy

DOI: 10.3390/e23020181

Authors: Edward Bormashenko, Alexander A. Fedorets, Leonid A. Dombrovsky, Michael Nosonovsky

Institutions: Ariel University, University of Tyumen, Joint Institute for High Temperatures, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Language: English

Topic: Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics

Subfield: Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Field: Physics and Astronomy

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $1,944

Funder: Russian Science Foundation