research papers
The capsid of the icosahedral virion is encapsulated between two polyhedra scaled according to the golden mean, each being composed of an icosahedron and a dodecahedron. Structural units of the coat proteins are enclosed into forms whose projections along the icosahedral symmetry axes obey the crystallographic law of rational indices.
research papers
The surface structures of viral capsids are described in terms of polyhedra with icosahedral symmetry and rational indices. It is shown that the Caspar-Klug and the Twarock approaches can be embedded into this framework. The crystallographic scaling transformations are worked out explicitly and are used to derive the icosahedral forms for some viruses, including the Caspar-Klug and Twarock cases.