Nucleic and Amino Acid Sequences Support Structure-Based Viral Classification

Viral capsids protect nucleic acid genomes, which in turn encode capsid proteins. This tight coupling of protein shell and nucleic acids, together with strong functional constraints on capsid protein folding and architecture, leads to the hypothesis that capsid protein-coding nucleotide sequences may retain signatures of ancient viral evolution. We have been able to show that this is indeed the case, using the major capsid proteins of viruses forming icosahedral capsids. Importantly, we detected similarity at the nucleotide level between capsid protein-coding regions from viruses infecting cells belonging to all three domains of life, reproducing a previously established structure-based classification of icosahedral viral capsids.See it on Scoop.it, via Viruses and Bioinformatics from Virology.uvic.ca
Nucleic and Amino Acid Sequences Support Structure-Based Viral Classification
Source: Viral Bioinformatics