Fig 6. Size and morphology of shells assembled from subunits with no spontaneous curvature, for varying system sizes and shell bending modulus κ_s.

The y-axis gives the number of subunits in the largest cluster at the final simulation frame. Black diamonds correspond to Brownian dynamics simulation results for the smallest system size in which a complete shell formed, and the dashed line shows the best fit of Eq (1) to this data. The snapshots show examples of the final morphology at indicated parameter values. Two snapshots are shown of shells just below the threshold size for completion, with corresponding parameters indicated by circles. Other parameters are ε_CC = 1.7, ε_HH = 1.8, and ε_SC = 7.0.