Virology Lectures 2017 #4: Structure of Viruses

Virus particles are built to protect the genome and to deliver it to a new host cell. 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, and metastability, and end with a discussion of the lipid envelope derived from the host cell that is embedded with viral glycoproteins.