Twarock R, Hendrix R W
Departments of Mathematics and Biology, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK.
J Theor Biol. 2006 Jun 7;240(3):419-24. doi: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2005.10.001. Epub 2005 Dec 9.
A vital part of a virus is its protein shell, called the viral capsid, that encapsulates and hence protects the viral genome. It has been shown in Twarock [2004. A tiling approach to vius capsids assembly explaining a structural puzzle in virology. J. Theor. Biol. 226, 477-482] that the surface structures of viruses with icosahedrally symmetric capsids can be modelled in terms of tilings that encode the locations of the protein subunits. This theory is extended here to multi-level tilings in order to model crosslinking structures. The new framework is demonstrated for the case of bacteriophage HK97, and it is shown, how the theory can be used in general to decide if crosslinking, and what type of crosslinking, is compatible from a mathematical point of view with the geometrical surface structure of a virus.
病毒的一个重要组成部分是其蛋白质外壳，称为病毒衣壳，它包裹并因此保护病毒基因组。特沃罗克（2004年。一种用于病毒衣壳组装的平铺方法，解释了病毒学中的一个结构难题。《理论生物学杂志》226卷，477 - 482页）表明，具有二十面体对称衣壳的病毒的表面结构可以用编码蛋白质亚基位置的平铺来建模。在此将该理论扩展到多层次平铺，以对交联结构进行建模。针对噬菌体HK97的情况展示了这个新框架，并且表明，从数学角度来看，该理论如何能够普遍用于判定交联以及何种类型的交联与病毒的几何表面结构是兼容的。
