Survival of Virus Particles in Water Droplets: Hydrophobic Forces and Landauer’s Principle

• Main Authors: Edward Bormashenko, Alexander A. Fedorets, Leonid A. Dombrovsky, Michael Nosonovsky
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-01-01
• Series: Entropy
• Subjects: viruses; bioinformatics; information; droplet cluster; Landauer’s principle
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/23/2/181

Many small biological objects, such as viruses, survive in a water environment and cannot remain active in dry air without condensation of water vapor. From a physical point of view, these objects belong to the mesoscale, where small thermal fluctuations with the characteristic kinetic energy of <i>k</i>_B<i>T</i> (where <i>k</i>_B is the Boltzmann’s constant and <i>T</i> is the absolute temperature) play a significant role. The self-assembly of viruses, including protein folding and the formation of a protein capsid and lipid bilayer membrane, is controlled by hydrophobic forces (i.e., the repulsing forces between hydrophobic particles and regions of molecules) in a water environment. Hydrophobic forces are entropic, and they are driven by a system’s tendency to attain the maximum disordered state. On the other hand, in information systems, entropic forces are responsible for erasing information, if the energy barrier between two states of a switch is on the order of <i>k</i>_B<i>T</i>, which is referred to as Landauer’s principle. We treated hydrophobic interactions responsible for the self-assembly of viruses as an information-processing mechanism. We further showed a similarity of these submicron-scale processes with the self-assembly in colloidal crystals, droplet clusters, and liquid marbles.