FoldaVirus, a knowledge-based icosahedral capsid prediction tool using AlphaFold.

FoldaVirus predicts complete icosahedral viral capsids up to T=9 symmetry by integrating AlphaFold structures with known viral architectures.

• Why it matters: Understanding viral capsid structures is crucial for virology and vaccine development, but experimental structures are limited compared to the vast number of viral sequences.
• What they did: The team developed a web-based tool that combines AlphaFold-predicted coat protein structures with knowledge of icosahedral arrangements, followed by energy minimization and validation using Mahalanobis distance.
• The result: This method successfully models capsids for diverse viruses, including pseudo-T=3 picornaviruses, enabling structural insights from sequences and bridging the gap between sequence data and 3D structures.