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-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.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 181 |
Pages (from-to) | 1-12 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Entropy |
Volume | 23 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Feb 2021 |
Keywords
- Bioinformatics
- Droplet cluster
- Information
- Landauer’s principle
- Viruses
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Information Systems
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- General Physics and Astronomy
- Mathematical Physics
- Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)