Beyond icosahedral symmetry in packings of proteins in spherical shells

Significance The design and construction of man-made structures at microscopic scales are one of the key goals of modern nanotechnology. With nature as inspiration, synthetic biological building blocks have recently been designed that self-assemble into quasi-spherical shells or cages. Whereas many natural protein building blocks self-assemble into highly symmetric ordered shells (e.g., viruses), our study shows that surprisingly even a small amount of (unavoidable) flexibility in the synthetic building blocks leads to stable disordered configurations. Our work provides a new design paradigm: Modulating the flexibilities of the components, one can control the regularity of the packing and, consequently, the surface properties of a synthetic cage.