It's not a hacker lab. At Brandeis University, sophisticated computational models and advances in graphical processing units are helping scientists understand the complex interplay between genomic data, virus structure and the formation of the virus' outer "shell" — critical for replication.
"We hope that some of what we are finding will help researchers alter virus assembly, leaving viruses unable to replicate," says post-doctoral fellow Jason Perlmutter, first author of the scientific paper describing the technique, published in the open access journaleLife.
