RHDV Virus Structure Determined

 

Atomic model of rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV) capsid. Simulations carried out using the Blue Waters petascale supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) have determined the structure of RHDV (belonging to the genus Lagovirus), which causes a highly infectious and often fatal illness in domestic and wild rabbits. The research was a collaboration involving the University of Illinois (UI) at Urbana-Champaign, the University of California, San Diego, and several Chinese research institutions. According to researchers, this “provides a reliable, pseudo-atomic model of a Lagovirus and suggests a new candidate for an efficient vaccine that can be used to protect rabbits from RHDV infection.

Klaus Schulten, a biophysicist with the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at UI-Urbana-Champaign, co-authored the study, which was published in PLOS Pathogens. Computing capabilities were supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (grant OCI 07-25070).To learn more about this research, see the NCSA news story U.S.-China team determines structure of virus with Blue Waters. (Date of Image: November 2012)

Credit: Yanxin Liu and Klaus Schulten, Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Fei Sun, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences