virion morphology diagrams
The updated virion morphology diagrams offer a comprehensive overview of the diverse forms of viruses, categorized by host and genome type at the family level. These diagrams are roughly to scale, though variations in virion size and the number of genome segments may occur within families. Some viruses have uncertain hosts, especially those identified through metagenomic analysis of environmental samples. Head-tail viruses that infect archaea and bacteria are depicted without side tail fibres for simplicity. Viruses with variable sizes are marked with division slashes (//), and predicted morphologies are shown in grey. Viruses that lack extracellular particles are considered "capsidless" and are represented by icons for single-strand or double-strand nucleic acids. The term protist is used to describe any eukaryotic organism that isn't an animal, plant, or fungus, helping to simplify viral categorization across different types of genetic material and hosts.
