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

Entropy

Edward Bormashenko¹  Alexander A. Fedorets²  Leonid A. Dombrovsky²  Michael Nosonovsky² 

[1] Department of Chemical Engineering, Biotechnology and Materials, Engineering Science Faculty, Ariel University, Ariel 40700, Israel;X-BIO Institute, University of Tyumen, 6 Volodarskogo St, 625003 Tyumen, Russia;

关键词: viruses;    bioinformatics;    information;    droplet cluster;    Landauer’s principle;   

DOI  :  10.3390/e23020181

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

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 k_BT (where k_B 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 k_BT, 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.

【 授权许可】

Unknown