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Updated: Jun 27, 2026

Structure of HIV-1 Capsid Assemblies by Cryo-electron Microscopy and Iterative Helical Real-space Reconstruction
Published on: August 9, 2011
Group theory of icosahedral virus capsid vibrations: a top-down approach
Kasper Peeters1, Anne Taormina
1Institute for Theoretical Physics, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80.195, 3508 TD Utrecht, The Netherlands. kasper.peeters@aei.mpg.de
Abstract:
We explore the use of a top-down approach to analyse the dynamics of icosahedral virus capsids and complement the information obtained from bottom-up studies of viral vibrations available in the literature. A normal mode analysis based on protein association energies is used to study the frequency spectrum, in which we reveal a universal plateau of low-frequency modes shared by a large class of Caspar-Klug capsids. These modes break icosahedral symmetry and are potentially relevant to the genome release mechanism. We comment on the role of viral tiling theory in such dynamical considerations.
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