Recent advances in coarse-grained modeling of virus assembly

- Computational modeling reveals aspects of virus assembly that are not accessible to experiments.
- Coarse-grained models are required to simulate assembly.
- Simulations have demonstrated that viral capsids assemble around RNA by two classes of pathways.
- Simulations have shown how sequence-specific interactions drive selective packaging of viral RNA.
- Simulations identified a potential growth pathway for the mature HIV capsid.