Reguera, D. (David)Garrido Zornoza, Miguel2019-10-022019-10-022019-06https://hdl.handle.net/2445/141524Treballs Finals de Grau de Física, Facultat de Física, Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2019, Tutor: David Reguera LópezThe morphogenesis of a virus is one of the most important steps in its life cycle, since a well-formed structure is vital to survive in hostile environments and to infect hosts. Viral selfassembly resembles a nucleation process where individual proteins stochastically form aggregates driven by a favourable free-energy of binding. The kinetics of the process is strongly regulated by the existence of a free-energy barrier between the viral constituents in solution and the fully-formed virus, in analogy with a first-order phase transition. In this work a coarse-grained model of viral assembly units is implemented in a Brownian Dynamics simulation and used to characterize viral nucleation kinetics. From simulations we evaluate the steady-state rate of capsid formation and reconstruct the free-energy landscape of the process, from which the critical capsid size and the nucleation barrier are obtained. Finally, a brief comparison of the simulations results with the predictions of classical nucleation theory (CNT) is discussed5 p.application/pdfengcc-by-nc-nd (c) Garrido, 2019http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/CàpsidaNucleacióTreballs de fi de grauCapsidNucleationBachelor's thesesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesisinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess