Coronavirus Peplomer Interaction

By virtue of their lack of motility, viruses rely entirely on their own temperature

(Brownian motion) to position themselves properly for cell attachment. Spiked

viruses use one or more spikes (called peplomers) to attach. The coronavirus uses

adjacent peplomer pairs. These peplomers, identically charged, repel one another

over the surface of their convex capsids to form beautiful polyhedra. We identify the

edges of these polyhedra with the most important peplomer hydrodynamic

interactions. These convex capsids may be spherical or not, and their peplomer

population declines with infection time. These peplomers are short,

equidimensional, and bulbous, with triangular bulbs. We explore

the interactions between nearby peplomer bulbs. By interactions, we mean the

hydrodynamic interferences between the velocity profiles caused by the drag of the

suspending fluid when the virus rotates. We find that these peplomer hydrodynamic

interactions raise rotational diffusivity of the virus, and thus affect its ability to

infect.