Entrancing Animated Trading Cards Reveal the Surprising Beauty of Viruses

Designer and neurobiologist Eleanor Lutz created a series of awesome virus trading cards.

Viruses can be scary, but they're beautiful. Take adenovirus type 5, colloquially known as the common cold. You can't see the virus with the naked eye, of course, but a microscope reveals a hypnotic icosahedral structure. It's big (for a virus), and sports a spike at each vertex that helps it stick to target cells. The form follows function, which in this case, means infiltrating the cells of a host and hijacking their replication machinery.

No two viruses look the same. “They remind me of a biological version of snowflakes,” says Eleanor Lutz, a designer and neurobiology PhD student who has created a series of fantastic animated virus trading cards. Lutz’s cards read like old-school baseball cards, but instead of teams and batting averages, hers include things like genus and symptoms.

Eleanor Lutz

Lutz began the project after learning how to use Chimera, a molecular 3-D modeling program, in a neurobiology class. “I thought it was a really fun and powerful program, so I decided to see if I could use it in a design project,” she says. She started by sifting through viruses on the Protein Data Bank, an online archive of 3-D molecular data, looking for what she describes as the “most awesome” viruses, based on their shape and function. From there, she uploaded the structures to Chimera and began to tweak the lighting and resolution to highlight different features of each virus.

Lutz says she was attracted to the 5-fold symmetry of Dengue virus, adenovirus, chlorella, and HPV Type 16. Each features a capsid, the protein shell encasing the virus’ genetic information, and each capsid looks different. The four viruses she selected are 20-sided surfaces with rounded edges, but other viruses can be symmetrical and helical, with a spiral shape encasing the virus’ genetic information.

Every card features a breakdown of symptoms, sources, habitat, and how best to control the virus, which makes them very cool and pretty useful. At the very least, you can picture what’s attacking your body when the first signs of a cold appear. Lutz says she especially enjoyed working on the chlorella virus, a family of virus that affects green algae. “We hear about human viruses every day in the news, but before this project I never really thought about bacteria and algae having viruses of their own,” she says. “It seems so crazy to me that even a tiny, one-cell organism can be affected by a viral infection.” Indeed, viruses, in all their symmetric glory, really are all around us---it's just a shame we can't see them.