Researchers film human viruses in liquid droplets at near-atomic detail

A pond in summer can reveal more about a fish than a pond in winter. The fish living in icy conditions might remain still enough to study its scales, but to understand how the fish swims and behaves, it needs to freely move in three dimensions. The same holds true for analyzing how biological items, such as viruses, move in the human body, according to a research team led by Deb Kelly, Huck Chair in Molecular Biophysics and professor of biomedical engineering at Penn State, who has used advanced electron microscopy (EM) technology to see how human viruses move in high resolution in a near-native environment. The visualization technique could lead to improved understanding of how vaccine candidates and treatments behave and function as they interact with target cells, Kelly said.