Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

All Outputs (100)

Bi-Symmetric Polyhedral Cages with Nearly Maximally Connected Faces and Small Holes (2025)
Journal Article
Piette, B. (2025). Bi-Symmetric Polyhedral Cages with Nearly Maximally Connected Faces and Small Holes. Symmetry, 17(6), Article 940. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym17060940

Polyhedral cages (p-cages) provide a good description of the geometry of some families of artificial protein cages. In this paper we identify p-cages made out of two families of equivalent polygonal faces/protein rings, where each face has at least f... Read More about Bi-Symmetric Polyhedral Cages with Nearly Maximally Connected Faces and Small Holes.

Randomly Formed Polyhedral Cages (2025)
Journal Article
Lukács, Á., & Piette, B. M. A. G. (2025). Randomly Formed Polyhedral Cages. Axioms, 14(2), Article 83. https://doi.org/10.3390/axioms14020083

Polyhedral cages (or p-cages) are a generalisation of the polyhedron surface: they are objects in three-dimensional space consisting of planar polygons attached along shared edges but allowed to have holes and thus edges not shared by two polygons. T... Read More about Randomly Formed Polyhedral Cages.

Bi-Symmetric Polyhedral Cages with Maximally Connected Faces and Small Holes (2025)
Journal Article
Piette, B., & Lukács, Á. (2025). Bi-Symmetric Polyhedral Cages with Maximally Connected Faces and Small Holes. Symmetry, 17(1), Article 101. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym17010101

Polyhedral cages (p-cages) describe the geometry of some families of artificial protein cages. We identify the p-cages made out of families of equivalent polygonal faces such that the faces of one family have five neighbors and P1 edges, while those... Read More about Bi-Symmetric Polyhedral Cages with Maximally Connected Faces and Small Holes.

An artificial protein cage made from a 12-membered ring (2023)
Journal Article
Stupka, I., Biela, A. P., Piette, B., Kowalczyk, A., Majsterkiewicz, K., Borzęcka-Solarz, K., Naskalska, A., & Heddle, J. G. (2024). An artificial protein cage made from a 12-membered ring. Journal of Materials Chemistry B: Materials for biology and medicine, 12(2), 436-447. https://doi.org/10.1039/d3tb01659e

Artificial protein cages have great potential in diverse fields including as vaccines and drug delivery vehicles. TRAP-cage is an artificial protein cage notable for the way in which the interface between its ring-shaped building blocks can be modifi... Read More about An artificial protein cage made from a 12-membered ring.

The microtubule nucleating factor MACERATOR tethers AUGMIN7 to microtubules and governs phragmoplast architecture. (2023)
Journal Article
Schmidt-Marcec, S., Parish, A., Smertenko, T., Hickey, M., Piette, B. M. A. G., & Smertenko, A. (2024). The microtubule nucleating factor MACERATOR tethers AUGMIN7 to microtubules and governs phragmoplast architecture. The Plant Cell, 36(4), 1072–1097. https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koad304

The plant cytokinetic microtubule array, called the phragmoplast, exhibits higher microtubule dynamics in its center (midzone) than at the periphery (distal zone). This behavior is known as the axial asymmetry. Despite being a major characteristic of... Read More about The microtubule nucleating factor MACERATOR tethers AUGMIN7 to microtubules and governs phragmoplast architecture..

Near-Miss Bi-Homogenous Symmetric Polyhedral Cages (2023)
Journal Article
Piette, B., & Lukács, Á. (2023). Near-Miss Bi-Homogenous Symmetric Polyhedral Cages. Symmetry, 15(9), Article 1804. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym15091804

Following the discovery of an artificial protein cage with a paradoxical geometry, we extend the concept of homogeneous symmetric congruent equivalent near-miss polyhedral cages, for which all the faces are equivalent, and define bi-homogeneous symme... Read More about Near-Miss Bi-Homogenous Symmetric Polyhedral Cages.

Near-Miss Symmetric Polyhedral Cages (2023)
Journal Article
Piette, B. M. A. G., & Lukács, Á. (2023). Near-Miss Symmetric Polyhedral Cages. Symmetry, 15(3), Article 717. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym15030717

Following the experimental discovery of several nearly symmetric protein cages, we define the concept of homogeneous symmetric congruent equivalent near-miss polyhedral cages made out of P-gons. We use group theory to parameterize the possible config... Read More about Near-Miss Symmetric Polyhedral Cages.

Shape-Morphing of an Artificial Protein Cage with Unusual Geometry Induced by a Single Amino Acid Change (2022)
Journal Article
Sharma, M., Biela, A. P., Kowalczyk, A., Borzęcka-Solarz, K., Piette, B. M., Gaweł, S., Bishop, J., Kukura, P., Benesch, J. L., Imamura, M., Scheuring, S., & Heddle, J. G. (2022). Shape-Morphing of an Artificial Protein Cage with Unusual Geometry Induced by a Single Amino Acid Change. ACS Nanoscience Au, 2(5), 404-413. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnanoscienceau.2c00019

Artificial protein cages are constructed from multiple protein subunits. The interaction between the subunits, notably the angle formed between them, controls the geometry of the resulting cage. Here, using the artificial protein cage, “TRAP-cage”, w... Read More about Shape-Morphing of an Artificial Protein Cage with Unusual Geometry Induced by a Single Amino Acid Change.

Characterization of near-miss connectivity-invariant homogeneous convex polyhedral cages (2022)
Journal Article
Piette, B. M., Kowalczyk, A., & Heddle, J. G. (2022). Characterization of near-miss connectivity-invariant homogeneous convex polyhedral cages. Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 478(2260), Article 20210679. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2021.0679

Following the discovery of a nearly symmetric protein cage, we introduce the new mathematical concept of a near-miss polyhedral cage (p-cage) as an assembly of nearly regular polygons with holes between them. We then introduce the concept of the conn... Read More about Characterization of near-miss connectivity-invariant homogeneous convex polyhedral cages.

Artificial Protein Cage with Unusual Geometry and Regularly Embedded Gold Nanoparticles (2022)
Journal Article
Majsterkiewicz, K., Biela, A. P., Maity, S., Sharma, M., Piette, B. M., Kowalczyk, A., Gaweł, S., Chakraborti, S., Roos, W. H., & Heddle, J. G. (2022). Artificial Protein Cage with Unusual Geometry and Regularly Embedded Gold Nanoparticles. Nano Letters, 22(8), 3187-3195. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.1c04222

Artificial protein cages have great potential in a number of areas including cargo capture and delivery and as artificial vaccines. Here, we investigate an artificial protein cage whose assembly is triggered by gold nanoparticles. Using biochemical a... Read More about Artificial Protein Cage with Unusual Geometry and Regularly Embedded Gold Nanoparticles.

A Peptide–Nucleic Acid Replicator Origin for Life (2020)
Journal Article
Piette, B. M., & Heddle, J. G. (2020). A Peptide–Nucleic Acid Replicator Origin for Life. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 35(5), 397-406. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2020.01.001

Evolution requires self-replication. But, what was the very first self-replicator directly ancestral to all life? The currently favoured RNA World theory assigns this role to RNA alone but suffers from a number of seemingly intractable problems. Inst... Read More about A Peptide–Nucleic Acid Replicator Origin for Life.

Long-range donor-acceptor electron transport mediated by α helices (2019)
Journal Article
Brizhik, L., Luo, J., Piette, B., & Zakrzewski, W. (2019). Long-range donor-acceptor electron transport mediated by α helices. Physical Review E, 100(6), Article 062205. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.100.062205

We study the long-range electron and energy transfer mediated by a polaron on an α-helix polypeptide chain coupled to donor and acceptor molecules at opposite ends of the chain. We show that for specific parameters of the system, an electron initiall... Read More about Long-range donor-acceptor electron transport mediated by α helices.

An ultra-stable gold-coordinated protein cage displaying reversible assembly (2019)
Journal Article
Malay, A. D., Miyazaki, N., Biela, A., Chakraborti, S., Majsterkiewicz, K., Stupka, I., Kaplan, C. S., Kowalczyk, A., Piette, B. M., Hochberg, G. K., Wu, D., Wrobel, T. P., Fineberg, A., Kushwah, M. S., Kelemen, M., Vavpetič, P., Pelicon, P., Kukura, P., Benesch, J. L., Iwasaki, K., & Heddle, J. G. (2019). An ultra-stable gold-coordinated protein cage displaying reversible assembly. Nature, 569, 438-442. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1185-4

Symmetrical protein cages have evolved to fulfil diverse roles in nature, including compartmentalization and cargo delivery1, and have inspired synthetic biologists to create novel protein assemblies via the precise manipulation of protein–protein in... Read More about An ultra-stable gold-coordinated protein cage displaying reversible assembly.

Directed polaron propagation in linear polypeptides induced by intramolecular vibrations and external electric pulses (2018)
Journal Article
Luo, J., & Piette, B. (2018). Directed polaron propagation in linear polypeptides induced by intramolecular vibrations and external electric pulses. Physical Review E, 98(1), Article 012401. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.98.012401

We study the propagation of α-helix polarons in a model describing the nonadiabatic interaction between an electron and a lattice of quantum mechanical oscillators at physiological temperature. We show that when excited by a subpicosecond electric pu... Read More about Directed polaron propagation in linear polypeptides induced by intramolecular vibrations and external electric pulses.

Reciprocal Nucleopeptides as the Ancestral Darwinian Self-Replicator (2017)
Journal Article
Banwell, E. F., Piette, B. M., Taormina, A., & Heddle, J. G. (2018). Reciprocal Nucleopeptides as the Ancestral Darwinian Self-Replicator. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 35(2), 404-416. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msx292

Even the simplest organisms are too complex to have spontaneously arisen fully-formed, yet precursors to first life must have emerged ab initio from their environment. A watershed event was the appearance of the first entity capable of evolution: the... Read More about Reciprocal Nucleopeptides as the Ancestral Darwinian Self-Replicator.

A generalised Davydov-Scott model for polarons in linear peptide chains (2017)
Journal Article
Luo, J., & Piette, B. (2017). A generalised Davydov-Scott model for polarons in linear peptide chains. The European Physical Journal B, 90(8), Article 155. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2017-80209-2

We present a one-parameter family of mathematical models describing the dynamics of polarons in periodic structures, such as linear polypeptides, which, by tuning the model parameter, can be reduced to the Davydov or the Scott model. We describe the... Read More about A generalised Davydov-Scott model for polarons in linear peptide chains.

Donor-acceptor electron transport mediated by solitons (2014)
Journal Article
Brizhik, L., Piette, B., & Zakrzewski, W. (2014). Donor-acceptor electron transport mediated by solitons. Physical review E: Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics, 90(5), Article 052915. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.90.052915

We study the long-range electron and energy transfer mediated by solitons in a quasi-one-dimensional molecular chain (conjugated polymer, alpha-helical macromolecule, etc.) weakly bound to a donor and an acceptor. We show that for certain sets of par... Read More about Donor-acceptor electron transport mediated by solitons.

Thermal enhancement and stochastic resonance of polaron ratchet (2014)
Journal Article
Brizhik, L., Eremko, A., Piette, B., & Zakrzewski, W. (2014). Thermal enhancement and stochastic resonance of polaron ratchet. Physical review E: Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics, 89(6), Article 062905. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.89.062905

We study the ratchet drift of large polarons (solitons) in molecular diatomic chains induced by unbiased time periodic electric fields at nonzero temperature below its critical value. We show that, at a nonzero temperature, the critical value of the... Read More about Thermal enhancement and stochastic resonance of polaron ratchet.