Virology Lectures 2019 #4: Structure of Viruses
Viral particles are metastable: they must not only protect the genome in its journey among hosts, but also come apart under the right conditions to release the genome into cells. In this lecture we describe the two major forms of symmetry for building virus particles, helical and icosahedral. We discuss how to make larger and larger viruses, the triangulation number, quasiequivalence, end with a discussion of the lipid envelope derived from the host cell that is embedded with viral glycoproteins.