Affiliations: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Amit Gefen, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. Tel.: +972 3 6408093; Fax: +972 3 6405845; E-mail:gefen@eng.tau.ac.il
Abstract: BACKGROUND: As obligate intracellular parasites, all viruses
penetrate target cells to initiate replication and infection. OBJECTIVE: This study introduces two approaches for evaluating the
contact loads applied to a cell during early penetration of non-enveloped
icosahedral viruses. METHODS: The first approach is analytical modeling which is based
on Hertz's theory for the contact of two elastic bodies; here we model the
virus capsid as a triangle and the cell as an order-of-magnitude larger
sphere. The second approach is finite element modeling, where we simulate
three types of viruses: adeno-, papilloma- and polio- viruses, each
interacting with a cell section. RESULTS: We find that the peak contact pressures and forces
generated at the initial virus-cell contact depend on the virus geometry -
that is both size and shape. With respect to shape, we show that the
icosahedral virus shape induces greater peak pressures compared to a
spherical virus shape. With respect to size, it is shown that the larger the
virus is the greater are the contact loads in the attacked cell. CONCLUSION: Utilization of our modeling can be substantially
useful not only for basic science studies, but also in other, more applied
fields, such as in the field of gene therapy, or in `phage' virus studies.
