80 Million Core-Hours

This image shows the surface of an influenza virus. Influenza binds to and enters host cells using a protein on its surface called influenza hemagglutinin, which is the large, bulbous brown structure that occupies much of the field of view. In blue is an artificial protein that was designed to bind to the lower “stem” region of hemagglutinin, and to prevent the molecular motions that it must undergo in order to allow the virus to fuse with a host cell. This protein was designed by Sarel Fleichman, Eva Strauch, and others in the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington. It is hoped that proteins like these could one day be useful for preventing or treating influenza infection.