Abstract
Despite the absence of translational symmetries, snow flakes and biomacromolecules share properties of crystals and/or quasicrystals, such as an underlying lattice structure and crystallographic scaling leaving the lattice invariant.
At the morphological level, one observes in axially symmetric proteins linear and planar crystallographic scalings, whereas 3-dimensional scaling occurs in icosahedral viruses.
In all the cases considered so far, the lattices involved are integral. This property implies the existence of a metric tensor with integral entries, up to one real lattice parameter, as in the cubic case. One finds, in particular, isometric hexagonal lattices (with c = a). Similar and additional properties allow one to speak of strongly correlated biomacromolecular structures
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Janner, A. (2008). Mysterious crystallography. In: Boeyens, J.C., Ogilvie, J. (eds) Models, Mysteries and Magic of Molecules. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5941-4_11
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