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The intact capsid consists of 180 copies of the coat protein. The researchers used an electrospray (ES) technique to create a fine spray of charged capsid ions, which were then cooled through collisions with molecules of N. That dampens the explosive force of the ES process, preventing the capsid ions from breaking apart as they speed to the mass analyzer in time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometer. The authors also ran their ES-TOF analysis without the cooling step to obtain information about the arrangement of the capsid's protein subunits. Their results suggest that the protein coat is constructed from hexameric building blocks. They note that these results are consistent with the trimer of dimers previously observed in the X-ray crystal structure
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