Modeling Viral Capsid Assembly

Viruses play a role in a significant portion of human diseases, as well as those of other animals, plants, and bacteria. This chapter focuses on the use of theoretical and computational modeling to understand the viral assembly process. It provides overviews of virus structure, assembly, and the experiments used to characterize the assembly process. An equilibrium analysis of the assembly of empty protein shells is performed. The chapter presents simple mathematical representation of the assembly process and its relevant timescales. This is followed by several types of modeling approaches that have been used to analyze and predict in vitro assembly kinetics. The chapter extends the equilibrium and dynamical approaches to consider the co-assembly of capsid proteins with RNA or other polyanionic cargoes. It concludes with some of the important open questions and ways in which modeling can make a stronger connection with experiments.