Emergence of fiber in frustrated self assembly

Self-organization is an essential characteristic of life at all scales. Mistakes in self-organization at the protein level can lead to severe diseases such as Alzheimer’s, in which normally soluble proteins aggregate into fibril structures that interfere with the protein’s initial biological role. We try to understand the general mechanism behind these aggregation phenomena, which are exhibited by a wide variety of proteins. If surface tension energy would drive aggregation, it would do so at the cost of elastic energy due to protein deformation from there ill-fitting shape. Previous studies have found that fiber-like aggregates can have an energetic benefit over other shapes, representing a trade-off between surface tension and elastic energies. In this work, we use statistical physics tools to investigate the thermodynamic stability of such fibers in more realistic conditions