Figure 22.1.1.5 

Delaunay triangulation and its relation to the Voronoi construction. (a) A standard schematic of the Voronoi construction. The atoms used to define the Voronoi planes around the central atom are circled. Lines connecting these atoms to the central one are part of the Delaunay triangulation, which is shown in (b). Note that atoms included in the triangulation cannot be selected strictly on the basis of a simple distance criterion relative to the central atom. The two circles about the central atoms illustrate this. Some atoms within the outer circle but outside the inner circle are included in the triangulation, but others are not. In the context of protein structure, Delaunay triangulation is useful in identifying true `packing contacts', in contrast to those contacts found purely by distance threshold. The broken lines in (a) indicate planes that were initially included in the polyhedron but then removed by the `chopping-down' procedure (see Fig. 22.1.1.4).