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298. Do all spherical viruses have icosahedral symmetry?
This is a guest post by Eric Lewin Altshuler (UMDNJ, Newark) and Antonio Perez-Garrido (U. of Cartagena). Dmitry.
More than half a century ago Crick and Watson (Nature, 177, 473-475 (1956)) had the ingenious insight that viral capsids must be made of multiple units of the same small number of proteins, lest the viral genome be orders of magnitude too large – if coding for each of the hundreds or thousands of capsid proteins separately – to fit inside its capsid. Caspar and Klug (Cold Spring Harbor Symposia On Quantitative Biology 27, 1 (1962)) made a significant advance in appreciating that the structure of a number of viral capsids had icosahedral symmetry. They described capsids by a number 
(
, 
non-negative integers) having 
subunits arranged into an icosadeltahedral lattice. However, determination of the structure of these large capsids is a tour de force of experimentation, and until recently capsid structure was actually determined by fitting relatively low resolution data to an assumption of an icosadeltahedral capsid (see Strauss, “Viruses and Human Disease”, p. 34, Academic Press, San Diego (2002) and refs. therein.) Recently, though high resolution studies have confirmed icosadeltahedral configurations for 
1, 3 (Cardone et al., Nature 457, 694-698 (2009)) and 7 (Jiang et al., Nature 439 612-616 (2006) and Gertsman et al., Nature doi:10.1038/nature07686) viruses. So do all spherical viruses have icosahedral symmetry?
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