In their frustratingly slow effort to conquer the common cold, medical scientists decades ago learned that the world's most prevalent disorder is usually caused by any of a hundred or so different kinds of viruses. Under an electron microscope, they all look like simple fuzzy balls, but the precise architecture of these so-called rhinoviruses has remained obscure. Last week teams of scientists from Purdue and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, reported in the journal Nature that they had mapped in exquisite atomic detail the structure of a human cold virus called HRV14. Their achievement marked the first time that the shape...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
