Microscopy Home Page
Viruses are far too small to be viewed by light microscopy, but early transmission electron microscopes were soon used to produce the first images of a range of virus particles.
HIV, ebola, rabies, herpes, the common cold; viruses range from the deadly to little more than a mild nuisance.
Because of their immense importance as disease-causing organisms in man, farm animals, crop plants, and in wildlife, viruses will always be of great interest to a wide range of people. There's currently little we can do to combat these tiny objects (other than inoculation to prime the body's immune system), but the more we can learn about them the better.
To discover a lot more about virus research take a look at the very extensive pages provided on the World Wide Web Server for Virology. This is an absolute must visit site for everyone even slightly interested in matters viral. It provides a central hub of information of every kind with abundant links to other useful places.
Libraries of animal and plant virus images are available. These should prove useful for teaching, and the providers allow their use freely for educational purposes. Some of these pictures appear at the top of this article.
One way of obtaining more detailed information about viruses is to use tomographic reconstruction from a series of TEM images at different rotations. This has been done for several viruses and you can view the results for Uukuniemi virus provided by the University of Helsinki.
Viruses are so small and (relatively) simple that we can even determine their structure at the atomic level. The Institute for Molecular Virology page at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has some examples of this. The page explains how virus structure may help us to understand virus function. It includes a raw TEM image as well as processed images showing the detailed 3-D information which can be obtained. X-ray diffraction data is also presented, much of it showing virus particles or subunits at atomic resolution.