Internal Structure of Hepatitis B Revealed for First Time

Madison, Wisconsin - Nearly 12,000 photographs and some sophisticated mathematical modeling have led a two-university research team to come up with a picture of a virus that infects millions of people worldwide and kills many in the Third World.

The advance marks a significant leap forward in understanding how the virus replicates – and how to stop it from doing so.

In a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Indiana University at Bloomington, researchers for the first time were able to peer inside the shell, or capsid, of the hepatitis B virus and visually identify structures important for the its gene replication machinery, according to the study published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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