The paper: Beyond icosahedral symmetry in packings of proteins in spherical shells, describes theoretical work and numerical simulations by a team of mathematicians, theoretical physicists, chemists and biochemists from the University of Bristol's BioDesign Institute, and is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. 

The research was led by Professors Tanniemola Liverpool and Noah Linden from the School of Mathematics and Professor Dek Woolfson from the Schools of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and builds on previous research performed in Professor Woolfson’s laboratory on synthetic protein cages. The team’s findings shed light on understanding the regularity of the self-assembled cages, potentially leading to new approaches in protein design for self-assembly and driving new experimental methodologies.