What kind of almost regular cage shapes can be made from "Irregular" protein building blocks?

What is it about?

Our our new paper with collaborators at University of Durham looks at the mathematics of artificial protein cages. Usually these hollow, nanoscale objects are made as simple convex polyhedra using standard protein building blocks that are simple shapes such as pentagons and hexagons. but here we show that more usual protein building blocks (e.g. hendecagons, heptagons) can be used and still result in cages that appear regular to the naked eye. This widens the space of potential proteins that can be used and therefore the range of properties of the resulting cages. These may be useful in many areas such as drug delivery, vaccines, materials. The work appeared in Proceedings of the Royal Society A

Featured Image

Photo by Andrew Ridley on Unsplash

Photo by Andrew Ridley on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Artificial protein cages have a host of potential uses but typically their building blocks have been retstricted to a small subset of proteins of particular shapes this limits the possible types of cages that can be produced. By showing that unexpected protein shapes can make virtually regular cages we expand the possible cages that can be made.

Perspectives