Special Lecture

Cutting complexity down to size in the viral world with new technologies

Prof. David Stuart

Viruses outnumber hugely the rest of the biosphere, and have a profusion of shapes and sizes. Yet we still have little overall grasp of how the different families of viruses across the biosphere relate to one another - we cannot consult the fossil record and, even worse, rapid evolution has washed away almost all ancient marks from the gene and protein sequences. However we believe that viral capsids contain some faithful historical records embedded in their structure, if we can read them. I will explain how we are attempting to do this and give clues as to how we might extrapolate to very complicated non-icosahedral viruses. I will also show new X-ray technologies, which are making routine the structural analysis of viruses, and which should allow the better analysis of other complex biological machines