Towards accurate electrostatic models of patchy colloids and proteins Our fundamental understanding of how homogeneously charged, nano- to micron-scale particles interact when dispersed in a dilute electrolytic solution is provided by the DLVO theory. In the context of heterogeneously charged particles, we consider two alternative mean-field approaches: one (ICi) was introduced to describe the interactions between charged patchy colloids [1], the other (CSp) was introduced to describe the interactions between viruses [2]. While the ICi model describes a particle as an ion-impenetrable, dielectric sphere with a distribution of point charges in its inside, the CSp model considers a particle as a permeable shell with a continuous surface charge density. Despite the fact that these two approaches were developed under different hypothesis and within different approximations, they can be successfully put in relation to each other: we specifically consider dipolar and quadrupolar particles and build up a robust mapping between the different descriptions, based on matching the exact electrostatic potentials of the two models. Our approach recovers the DLVO expressions in the monopolar limit. The resulting position- and orientation-dependent pair energy profiles for heterogeneously charged particles show an impressive agreement with each other, thus providing additional insights in the mean-field description of heterogeneously charged systems such as charged patchy colloids and globular proteins [3]. [1] E. Bianchi, G. Kahl, and C. N. Likos, Soft Matter, 7:8313-8323, 2011 [2] A. L. Bozic and R. Podgornik, The Journal of Chemical Physics, 138:074902, 2013 [3] A. Gnidovec, E. Locatelli, S. Čopar, A. Božic, and E. Bianchi, in preparation