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| Paper IPM / P / 15038 |
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| Abstract: | |||||||||
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Electrostatic interactions play important roles in the formation and stability of viruses and virus-like
particles (VLPs) through processes that often involve added, or naturally occurring, multivalent ions.
Here, we investigate the electrostatic or osmotic pressure acting on the proteinaceous shell of a generic
model of VLPs, comprising a charged outer shell and a metallic nanoparticle core, coated by a charged
layer and bathed in an aqueous electrolyte solution. Motivated by the recent studies accentuating
the role of multivalent ions for the stability of VLPs, we focus on the effects of multivalent cations and
anions in an otherwise monovalent ionic solution. We perform extensive Monte-Carlo simulations based
on appropriate Coulombic interactions that consistently take into account the effects of salt screening,
the dielectric polarization of the metallic core, and the strong-coupling electrostatics due to multivalent
ions. We specifically study the intricate roles these factors play in the electrostatic stability of the model
VLPs. It is shown that while the insertion of a metallic nanoparticle by itself can produce negative,
inward-directed, pressure on the outer shell, addition of only a small amount of multivalent counterions
can robustly engender negative pressures, enhancing the VLP stability across a wide range of values for
the system parameters.
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