Multimedia Gallery
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
See other images like this on your iPhone or iPad download NSF Science Zone on the Apple App Store.
Images and other media in the National Science Foundation Multimedia Gallery are available for use in print and electronic material by NSF employees, members of the media, university staff, teachers and the general public. All media in the gallery are intended for personal, educational and nonprofit/non-commercial use only.
Images credited to the National Science Foundation, a federal agency, are in the public domain. The images were created by employees of the United States Government as part of their official duties or prepared by contractors as "works for hire" for NSF. You may freely use NSF-credited images and, at your discretion, credit NSF with a "Courtesy: National Science Foundation" notation.
Additional information about general usage can be found in Conditions.
Also Available:
Download the high-resolution JPG version of the image. (4 MB)
Use your mouse to right-click (Mac users may need to Ctrl-click) the link above and choose the option that will save the file or target to your computer.