In our recent paper in Communications Materials we showed that we could control the diameter of bacteriophage MS2 VLP by adding amino acids to an external loop sequence. We used cryoEM to determine the resulting structures which had different symmetries to the “normal” T=3 particle. Thanks to a great collaboration with Reidun Twarock and Farzad Chenar at The University of York we able to construct a mathematical model of how the amino acid changes lead, via alteration of assembly kinetics, to the observed changes in structure.
