Self Assembling Virus

I was inspired by the fact that viruses can self-assemble within a cell. After they force the host cell to make the proteins of the virus’s capsid, those proteins randomly move around until they spontaneously assemble into a stable shape like an icosahedron. I tried to mimic this process by 3D printing some pentagons with magnets inside of them and shaking them in a bag until they assembled into a dodecahedron. During my tests, I typically began to see groups of 3 or 4 pentagons after only a few seconds of shaking. After around 30 seconds, the dodecahedron was typically only missing a few pentagons. However, getting the final 1 or 2 pentagons to snap into place usually took a few more minutes of shaking.

Most of the time, the pentagons form the dodecahedral shape as expected. However, occasionally the pentagons find another stable shape such as the shape in the picture to the right.