FIGURE 2. The tail structure.

a, Top view of the tail in the epsilon15 reconstruction. Each of the six tailspikes is uniquely coloured with an arbitrary shade of red in order to illustrate the inexact six-fold arrangement around the central tail hub (yellow) with good six-fold symmetry. b, Higher-magnification side view of the tailspikes. The contact sites for two (labelled as 1 and 2) out of the six tailspikes are on the capsid surface protrusion densities at local two-fold positions (labelled with an asterisk). c, Each of the tailspikes is aligned with its neighbour (anticlockwise) with indicated amount of rotation around an axis that is tilted away from the six-fold axis in different degrees, as indicated in parentheses. The tailspikes in the original positions are displayed in the same shades of red as in a, whereas the rotated tailspikes in the new positions are displayed in yellow. d, Side view of the tail hub. The segmentation of the tail hub at the interacting regions with the tailspikes is arbitrary because of their tight binding and limited resolution.