Because ascovirus virions and ichnovirus particles display structural similarities, we developed an approach to search for homologs of virion structural proteins in ichnoviruses. These approaches were initiated in 2000 and recently finalized, but some of the conclusions have been published [14] . To date, only two virion proteins from the Campoletis sonorensis ichnovirus (CsIV) have been characterized [31, 32] . The first is the P44 (Acc N° AAD01199), a structural protein that appears to be located as a layer between the out envelope and nucleocapsid, and the second, P12, a capsid protein (Acc N° AF004367). Presently, there are more than one hundred ascoviral or iridoviral MCP sequences in databases. BLAST searches using these sequences failed to detect any similarities between CsIV virion proteins and ascoviral or iridoviral MCPs, or any other proteins [33] . To evaluate the possibility that homology between ichnovirus and ascovirus virion proteins may simply not be detectable by conventional Blastp searches, we used a different method, WAPAM (weighted automata pattern matching; [34] ). The models were designed on the basis of a previous study [22] demonstrating that MCP encoded by ascovirus, iridovirus, phycodnavirus and asfarvirus genomes are related, and all contain 7 conserved domains separated by hinges of very variable size. We investigated these conserved domains further using hydrophobic cluster analysis (HCA, [35] ). This