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thecreatorsproject:

Creating The Microscopic Art Of Jon Hopkins’ Immunity

WATCH: http://youtu.be/fXSpgZ1FxoA

afracturedreality:

The world’s most detailed 3D-model of HIV, and winner of 1st Place in Science’s Visualization Challenge, 2010.

At first glance, it could pass for a piece of crochet, a fluffy gray and orange ball. But its real-world counterpart is far more destructive: It claims an estimated 2 million lives a year and has wreaked more global havoc than some wars.

Ivan Konstantinov’s winning illustration reduces HIV to unnerving simplicity. His team at the Visual Science Company in Moscow spent months compiling data from more than 100 papers and assembling the information into a coherent image of a 100-nm HIV particle. They depicted the proteins in just 2 basic colors: Gray equals host, orange equals virus.

HIV breaks into immune cells and hijacks their genes. The orange proteins on the outside bind to the immune cell, letting the viral core slip inside. Once in, it fuses with the cell membrane (gray shell), turns its viral RNA into DNA, and integrates into the cell nucleus. The host cell then starts making viral proteins, turning into a virus factory.

By Ivan Konstantinov, Yury Stefanov, Aleksander Kovalevsky, and Yegor Voronin from the Visual Science Company in Moscow

World AIDS Day 2012

For more information on HIV in the UK, visit:

National AIDS Trust / HIV Aware / WorldAIDSday

scipsy:

Icosahedral capsid

(protein shell that envelops the DNA)

of Herpes simples virus 1 (HSV-1).

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Little Bastards