Knowing your enemy is an important principle of competition, and scientists may just have become more familiar with one nasty stomach virus.
Closeup looks at several strains of norovirus reveal that the vomit- and diarrhea-inducing virus can come in a variety of sizes, researchers report online June 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Knobs studding the virus’s protein shell are twisted slightly in some strains, and the pathogen may need charged zinc atoms to maintain its shell, the team learned.