Survival of virus particles in water droplets: Hydrophobic forces and landauer’s principle

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

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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 languageEnglish
Article number181
Pages (from-to)1-12
Number of pages12
JournalEntropy
Volume23
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 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)

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