The FASEB Journal, Vol 11, 733-742, Copyright © 1997 by The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology

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The making and breaking of symmetry in virus capsid assembly: glimpses of capsid biology from cryoelectron microscopy

AC Steven, BL Trus, FP Booy, N Cheng, A Zlotnick, JR Caston and JF Conway
Laboratory of Structural Biology, National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892, USA.

Virus capsids constitute a diverse and versatile family of protein- bound containers and compartments ranging in diameter from approximately 200 A (mass approximately 1 MDa) to >1500 A (mass>250 MDa). Cryoelectron microscopy of capsids, now attaining resolutions down to 10 A, is disclosing novel structural motifs, assembly mechanisms, and the precise locations of major epitopes. Capsids are essentially symmetric structures, and icosahedral surface lattices have proved to be widespread. However, many capsid proteins exhibit a remarkable propensity for symmetry breaking, whereby chemically identical subunits in distinct lattice sites have markedly different structures and packing relationships. Temporal differences in the conformation of a given subunit are also manifested in the large-scale conformational changes that accompany capsid maturation. Larger and more complex capsids, such as DNA bacteriophages and herpes simplex virus, are formed not by simple self-assembly, but under the control of tightly regulated programs that may include the involvement of viral scaffolding proteins and cellular chaperonins, maturational proteolysis, and conformational changes on an epic scale. In addition to its significance for virology, capsid-related research has implications for biology in general, relating to the still largely obscure assembly processes of macromolecular complexes that perform many important cellular functions.

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