Paper Number
IR26 

Session
Interfacial Rheology

Title
"Coronavirus pleomorphism"

Presentation Date and Time
October 11, 2022 (Tuesday) 2:10

Track / Room
Track 5 / Sheraton 2

Authors (Click on name to view author profile)

  1. Kanso, Mona (Queen's University)
  2. Giacomin, Alan Jeffrey (Queen's University)
  3. Naime, Marwa (American University of Beirut)
  4. Chaurasia, Vikash (Merchant Logo Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Gr)
  5. Tontiwattanakul, Khemapat (King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok)
  6. Fried, Eliot (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology)

Author and Affiliation Lines (in printed abstract book)
Mona Kanso1, Alan Jeffrey Giacomin2, Marwa Naime3, Vikash Chaurasia4, Khemapat Tontiwattanakul5 and Eliot Fried6
1Queen's University, Kingston, Canada; 2Queen's University, Kingston, Canada; 3American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon; 4Merchant Logo Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Gr, Okinawa, Japan; 5King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok, Bangkok, Thailand; 6Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Okinawa, Japan

Speaker / Presenter 
Giacomin, Alan Jeffrey

Keywords
theoretical methods; interfacial rheology

Text of Abstract
The coronavirus is always idealized as a spherical capsid with radially protruding spikes. However, histologically, in the tissues of infected patients, capsids in cross section are elliptical, and only sometimes spherical [B.W. Neuman, J Virol, 80, 7918 (2006)]. This capsid ellipticity implies that coronaviruses are oblate or prolate or both. We call this diversity of shapes, pleomorphism. Recently, the rotational diffusivity of the spherical coronavirus in suspension was calculated, from first principles, using general rigid bead- rod theory [M.A. Kanso, Phys Fluids, 32, 113101 (2020)]. We did so by beading the spherical capsid, and then also by replacing each of its bulbous spikes with a single bead. In this paper, we use energy minimization for the spreading of the spikes, charged identically, over the oblate or prolate capsids. We use general rigid bead-rod theory to explore the role of such coronavirus cross-sectional ellipticity on its rotational diffusivity, the transport property around which its cell attachment revolves. We learn that coronavirus ellipticity drastically decreases its rotational diffusivity, be it oblate or prolate.