Chirality is ubiquitous in nature across all length scales, with major implications spanning fields from biology, chemistry and physics to materials science. How chirality propagates from nanoscale building blocks to meso- and macroscopic helical structures remains an open issue. Here, working with a canonical system of filamentous viruses, we demonstrate that their self-assembly into chiral liquid crystal phases quantitatively results from the interplay between two main mechanisms of chirality transfer: electrostatic interactions from the helical charge patterns on the virus surface, and fluctuation-based helical deformations leading to viral backbone helicity. Our experimental and theoretical approach provides a comprehensive framework for deciphering how chirality is hierarchically and quantitatively propagated across spatial scales. Our work highlights the ways in which supramolecular helicity may arise from subtle chiral contributions of opposite handedness that act either cooperatively or competitively, thus accounting for the multiplicity of chiral behaviours observed for nearly identical molecular systems.

手性在自然界中在所有长度尺度上都普遍存在，其重大影响涵盖生物学、化学、物理学到材料科学等领域。手性如何从纳米级构件传播到细观和宏观螺旋结构仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。在这里，我们利用丝状病毒的典型系统，证明它们定量地自组装成手性液晶相是手性转移的两种主要机制之间相互作用的结果：病毒表面螺旋电荷模式的静电相互作用和波动基于α的螺旋变形导致病毒骨架螺旋性。我们的实验和理论方法提供了一个全面的框架，用于破译手性如何在空间尺度上分层和定量传播。我们的工作强调了超分子螺旋性可能是由合作性或竞争性反向旋性的微妙手性贡献产生的，从而解释了在几乎相同的分子系统中观察到的手性行为的多样性。