  Self-assembly at submicroscopic scales is an important but little understood
phenomenon. A prominent example is virus capsid growth, whose underlying
behavior can be modeled using simple particles that assemble into polyhedral
shells. Molecular dynamics simulation of shell formation in the presence of an
atomistic solvent provides new insight into the self-assembly mechanism,
notably that growth proceeds via a cascade of strongly reversible steps and,
despite the large variety of possible intermediates, only a small fraction of
highly bonded forms appear on the pathway.
