Knowing the detailed shape of biomolecules such as proteins is essential for biological studies and drug discovery. Modern structural biology relies on techniques such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy to discover the tiny structural details of biomolecules. All these methods, however, require averaging over a large number of molecules and thus structural details of an individual biomolecule are often lost. Now researchers have made a breakthrough by obtaining the first nanometer (one billionth of a meter) resolved image of individual tobacco mosaic virions, a rod-shaped RNA virus that infects a wide range of plants, especially tobacco.
via Science Daily
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