Researchers Create Molecular Movie of Virus Preparing to Infect Healthy Cells
With SLAC’s X-ray laser, scientists captured a virus changing shape and rearranging its genome to invade a cell.
A research team has created for the first time a movie with nanoscale resolution of the three-dimensional changes a virus undergoes as it prepares to infect a healthy cell. The scientists analyzed thousands of individual snapshots from intense X-ray flashes, capturing the process in an experiment at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.