My friend Justin Paglino is an Associate Research Scientist in Neurosurgery at Yale. I was talking to him after band practice the other day (he’s also a ridiculously talented singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist), and it turns out he’s an expert on the parvovirus. So, to try and get my head around what he does, I looked up his little friend, and made a render of it. Or at least its capsid.
Viruses are just so damn cool, because they really look like little geometric space capsules, which, in fact, they kind of are. Only instead of astronauts or monkeys, they carry the virus’s DNA into the host cell’s nucleus where they pull off a bit of bio-espionage and convert the replication machinery inside to their own nefarious purposes. How cool is that? I mean unless you’re the host, in which case, it’s a little rude.
If you’re playing along at home, I started with pdb 1s58 from the Protein Data Bank