Virus Explorer – visualize and compare viruses in 3D models

It would be great if there was an "expert" mode on this, with a bit more detail on the coat protein structures. Modern molecular biology is so abstracted, you often lose sense of the actual scales of things. Being able to look at things as a whole like this really enable intuition to kick in.

It looks like they've tried to get surface density of proteins right, but I'd love to know if those densities are about right. This is all important for understanding viral receptor binding, and the importance of multi-valent interactions.

Viruses (in particular, RNA viruses) are great to study if you want to learn how genomics and the genetic code works. They are much nicer than studying large organisms because you can understand every part of them. They have just a handful of genes which correspond directly to proteins found in the resulting virion.

In fact, viruses like HIV and influenza are very much like compact computer programs. Every part of them has a particular purpose and interfaces with the host organism's mechanisms. It exploits the host and forces it to reproduce the virus. HIV's genome is even compressed using overlapping reading frames. It almost seems like it must have been designed.

One really cool part of the virus reproduction is that it must get the host to both reproduce and express its genome (ie. make proteins out of it). These things happen at completely different parts of the cell, yet somehow enough of the reproduced genomes end up in perfectly formed virions that the whole thing keeps working. Fascinating.

Unrelated to the subject matter: the interface is beautiful and reminiscent of old fashioned encyclopedic textbooks I used to love as a child (they had odd names like "Giant Book of Answers"). I would love to read Wikipedia in this type of format.

For a second I thought it was going to be 3D visualization of malware source code

looks like god took a lot of time to design them.