Elucidating chirality transfer in liquid crystals of viruses

TL;DR

This study investigates how chirality propagates from nanoscale virus structures to larger liquid crystal phases, revealing the interplay of electrostatic interactions and backbone helicity in this process.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive experimental and theoretical framework for understanding hierarchical chirality transfer in virus-based liquid crystals.

Findings

Chirality transfer results from electrostatic interactions and backbone helicity.

Supramolecular helicity can arise from competing chiral contributions.

The framework explains diverse chiral behaviors in similar molecular systems.

Abstract

Chirality is ubiquitous in nature across all length scales, with major implications spanning the fields of biology, chemistry and physics to materials science. How chirality propagates from nanoscale building blocks to meso- and macroscopic helical structures remains an open issue. Here, working with a canonical system of filamentous viruses, we demonstrate that their self-assembly into chiral liquid crystal phases quantitatively results from the interplay between two main mechanisms of chirality transfer: electrostatic interactions from the helical charge patterns on the virus surface, and fluctuation-based helical deformations leading to viral backbone helicity. Our experimental and theoretical approach provides a comprehensive framework for deciphering how chirality is hierarchically and quantitatively propagated across spatial scales. Our work highlights the ways in which supramolecular helicity may arise from subtle chiral contributions of opposite handedness which either act cooperatively or competitively, thus accounting for the multiplicity of chiral behaviors observed for nearly identical molecular systems.