Virus Crystallography

Crystallography provides a means of visualizing intact virus particles as well as their isolated constituent proteins and enzymes (1 –3 ) at near-atomic resolution, and is thus an extraordinarily powerful tool in the pursuit of a fuller understanding of the functioning of these simple biological systems. We have already expanded our knowledge of virus evolution, assembly, antigenic variation, and host-cell interactions; further studies will no doubt reveal much more. Although the rewards are enormous, an intact virus structure determination is not a trivial undertaking and entails a significant scaling up in terms of time and resources through all stages of data collection and processing compared to a traditional protein crystallographic structure determination. It is the methodology required for such studies that will be the focus of this chapter. The computational requirements were satisfied in the late 1970s, and when combined with the introduction of phase improvement techniques utilizing the virus symmetry (4 ,5 ), the application of crystallography to these massive macromolecular assemblies became feasible. This led to the determination of the first virus structure (the small RNA plant virus, tomato bushy stunt virus), by Harrison and coworkers in 1978 (6 ). The structures of two other plant viruses followed rapidly (7 ,8 ). In the 1980s, a major focus of attention was a family of animal RNA viruses; the Picornaviridae.