Image of the Week Gallery
Satellite Tobacco Mosaic Virus
Media Details
Created 10/20/2009
The image was produced using VMD molecular visualization and analysis software and was rendered by John Stone's Tachyon parallel ray tracing package. The model of the STMV was built using VMD as well. The ions were placed using a CUDA-based GPU-accelerated electrostatics algorithm, also included in VMD. The final Tachyon renderings used ambient occlusion lighting, which helps highlight pockets and cavities in the surface of the virus capsid that can be hard to see clearly with more commonly used direct lighting and depth cueing techniques. For more detail about the STMV model and various simulations that have been done on this structure, check out the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group website: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/STMV/
Credits
- John Stone , Theoretical Biophysics Group, Beckman Institute