Anatomy of a Virus

Roland Piquepaille writes "No, I'm not talking about a computer virus here, but about a real one, the Epsilon 15, which attacks the bacterium Salmonella. By writing a few lines of computer code, biologists from Purdue University have found a way to control a high-resolution microscope. This allowed them to look inside a virus. While previous teams were able to visualize the highly symmetric outer shell of other viruses, these researchers were able to see the whole structure of Epsilon 15, including its tail, its genome and even its core. This better knowledge of viruses which attack bacteria could lead to great advances in medicine, especially when antibiotics become inefficient because of bacteria resisting them."

Comments

A few lines of code? wtf?

[dynamo]

Is this some kind of perl golf competition? What decent software for visual recognition (it would be needed for focus) and fine machine control is going be be written in a few lines of code. I hate when reporters make up technical data like it's completely irrelevant..

Re:A few lines of code? wtf?

[jericho4.0]

I got the impression that it was more about proccessing data than controlling the scope. So the code would look more like a FFT or encryption algo.

Re:I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

'Scientists' have already tried to 'reverse engineer viruses'. You can easily read viral genomes as well as insert and delete genes. Biologists have been at it for years. The question is - what do you insert or delete? It's going to take a long time before anyone can come up with an answer.

Also the genome size has little to do with it. It's not the size, it's the content!

Re:I wonder...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

How long before people will stop citing Crichton and other pseudo-scientific fear-mongering fiction as a reason to interfere with science and technology?

"Forever," probably.