Viral Architecture

Bacteriophages are the most common type of virus on the planet. They are perfectly evolved for infecting bacterial cells, first latching on to the host microbe’s outer surface, then injecting their genetic material in a syringe-like manner into the cytoplasm. This specific targeting of bacteria – they are incapable of infecting other types of cells – has made them particularly interesting to biomedical scientists in recent years. Indeed, with the growing threat of bacterial antibiotic resistance, these viruses are being investigated as a possible alternative or adjunct to antibiotics. To design and engineer bacteriophages that can kill disease-causing bacteria and that are safe for medical use it’s essential to have a full and detailed understanding of how they're built. The image above, showing the recently determined molecular architecture of the bacteriophage Bas63, brings us a giant step closer to that goal.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by James Hodgkinson-Bean and colleagues
• Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
• Image originally published as 'Credit must be given to the creator' equating to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Research published in Science Advances, November 2025