Correction to: Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0630-0published online 17 October 2018

In the version of this article initially published, there was an error in the units listed in the last paragraph of the main text. The sentence should have read “On the basis of its 6 nucleotides per NP subunit and genome size of the Zaire ebolavirus (18,960 bases), the length of the nucleocapsid necessary to accommodate a single copy of genomic RNA is 950 nm”, rather than “950 μm”.