Question: Why do you want to make big images of virus'?

Ian Hands-Portman answered on 11 Mar 2014:

It helps us to understand how they infect and how we can stop them infecting – viruses are basically a little package of genes wrapped up in a protein shell. The proteins that make up the shell have a particular shape unique to each virus and it’s that shape that allows a virus to get into a cell and cause an infection. If we understand the shape we can study how it locks onto a cell and how it gets in, once we understand that we can start looking at ways to block the infection in the first place.

Even if we can’t design a way to block an infection, our own immune systems recgonise the shape of virus proteins and use that as a way to attack them we can design a vaccine that looks very very similar to the original virus but doesn’t cause an infection so we can make people immune without them having to get the disease first.

( They also look really good on pictures around the office 🙂 )