Chantal Valeriani (UCM) — Dynamics of biophysical systems at the mesoscale

💡 A new RES Success Story about viruses and microplastics💡

📋 "Dynamics of biophysical systems at the mesoscale" led by Chantal Valeriani from Universidad Complutense de Madrid

The project consisted in using Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD) to tackle two major challenges:
🔹 How coronavirus mutations affect the charge distribution on spike proteins and how variations in pH affect its electro-hydrodynamics in different conditions, such as rotational diffusivities and viscosities under oscillatory shears.
🔹 How microswimmers behave under gravity and how steric and hydrodynamic interactions shape their collective motion. 

🖥️ Thanks to RES supercomputer hashtag#MareNostrum5 GPP from Barcelona Supercomputing Center, they could simulate virus and different microswimmers with high detail. 

They found that under high gravitational forces, puller-type swimmers form hexagonal sedimented monolayers and repair surface defects on short timescales, and how viruses dynamics change under mutations. The results have great potential in areas such as health, microplastic sorting devices, self-repairing surfaces and cargo delivery systems.

📹 👈 In the left gif, the simulated coronavirus has 4 different DPD particles: envelope protein E (orange, which maintains a consistent structure), structural protein M (blue, the most abundant), spike glycoproteins (pink and green) and the red beads, counterpart to green particles. Water beads are omitted for clarity. 

📹 👇 In the central gif, the coronavirus is in an oscillatory shear flow, where blue beads are the solvent and the blue beads represent the walls of the simulation box. 

📹👉 In the right gif, they show three different coronavirus suspensions in different viral loads.