How does a simple virus self-assemble?

I don't know the answer to the question posed in the title, but I will try to convince you that it's an interesting problem. Many simple RNA viruses, which consist of proteins that form a highly-ordered protective shell (called a capsid) around the viral RNA, are self-assembled structures: infectious viruses can be spontaneously formed simply by mixing the RNA and the capsid proteins in a buffer, in the absence of any host factors. To understand how this self-assembly process happens, we do experiments on a much larger, model system: attractive colloidal particles on the surface of a sphere. On the curved droplet surface, the particles form branched networks of slender domains, a consequence of an elastic instability. These results show that Gaussian curvature can fundamentally alter the growth and shape of ordered domains, which suggests that the viral assembly pathway may be anything but trivial. I will conclude by showing new optical experiments that attempt to resolve the kinetics of assembly of a single viral capsid.