Visualising Viruses

Clare Taylor: 0:15

Welcome folks to ESWI Airborne. This is your host, Clare Taylor speaking, and this is where we talk with the members of ESWI, the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza. My first guest today is one of the younger members of ESWI, Dr Ed Hutchinson, an ESWI member since 2015, who received his PhD in 2009 from the University of Cambridge. Ed, welcome to ESWI Airborne.

Ed Hutchinson: 0:42

Thank you very much.

So, Ed, let's start with your research topic: molecular biology of influenza viruses. How did you first catch the bug?

So I came into my PhD knowing I was interested in molecular biology, but not really having a particular topic in mind, and I rotated through a number of labs at the start of it, which was possible on the scheme I was on, and ended up in the lab of Paul Diggard, who is an influenza molecular biologist, and I basically became fascinated by influenza viruses at that point and they have been the main thing I've been working on ever since.

Well, it certainly seems like a timely topic to study, and back in 2007, you were in fact recognised as Young Microbiologist of the Year by the Microbiology Society, and then, in 2008, the Biosciences Federation gave you the New Researcher Science Communication Award. What was it that you were doing in science communication that you got this recognition for?

So at the time I was doing a lot of science communication in schools. I was trying to find new ways of going out and talking to classes, often in primary schools, children, and introducing them to concepts in virology and in biology more generally. This was something which I enjoyed doing myself, but it was something which also became possible because I was able to interact with a lot of science communication networks which were there both at the university I was at and also across the UK as a whole. I think that's a really enjoyable way to do science communication. It's one which, for a lot of people studying the sciences, is their first contact with science communication, but it's only one of many ways in which you can communicate your science to the public, and since then I've been involved in quite a wide range of different science communication approaches, and almost always in collaboration with other people, in order to make those things happen.

What age children were you working with?

At the time it was often children coming up to the end of primary school in the UK, so those are sort of nine-year-olds, ten-year-olds, but I've also visited secondary schools, spoken to older children and indeed spoken to mixes of children and adults at science festivals and adults at other events. There's an overlap of skills, of skills and interests, um from all these groups obviously

And do these younger children have an appetite for science? H how do they respond to you?

Very much. So I think some people are a little bit nervous about talking to very young children, children who are not yet studying science, perhaps as a streamed subject. But actually it's a really nice age to talk to children about science because the enthusiasm is still there, at least it is for many people. The the idea of this is something which you have to slog through in a class which can come in with some older children who haven't kicked in yet. So it's lovely age just to say look, the world is exciting, we can tell you something new about it. Of course, children that age are often very enthusiastic, with lots of questions that you might not have thought of yourself as well.

They do have some of the best questions, indeed. And here's another question for you, your research work, as I understand it focuses on variations in the size and shape of influenza particles and the types of protein they contain. When did this variation, these variations, first catch your attention?

So actually this was the first encounter I had with working with influenza viruses. So I mentioned before, I ended up working in the lab of a researcher called Paul Diggard who is now at the University of Edinburgh. The first project I did with him, just to get a taste of work in his lab, was looking at influenza filaments, and normally when we study lab adapted strains of influenza we look at things which look a bit like hairy baked beans coming out of the cells very small, almost spherical particles. But clinical isolates of influenza form these extremely long filaments, hundreds of times longer than those in addition to those spherical particles.

But they're lost from many laboratory strains. They've been understudied. We still know very little about what they're for. Now that wasn't, in the end, what I did my PhD on, but it highlighted for me the fact that, although influenza has been intensively studied for decades, there are lots of very basic features of its biology which we've overlooked in the race towards the most pressing questions of how we tackle it, which we can now use the skills we have to come back to. So those range of different sizes, but also the surprisingly large variety of peculiar accessory proteins which influenza finds ways of encoding in its tiny genome, in addition to the main ones which we all know about.

Hairy baked beans. That's quite a compelling description. Can you paint a picture for our listeners of apart from hairy baked beans what these influenza particles look like.

So I think the thing to bear in mind when you're forming a mental image of an influenza virus is that it's not a regular box in the way that some viruses are. Some viruses have clicked together a protein coat with a very precisely defined set of components. Influenza viruses are more like a bag than a box. They've scooped together an array of components inside a membrane and that membrane is coated with spikes which will bind the virus onto the surface of cells. In this respect they're very like SARS-CoV-2, which of course everyone has seen many pictures of. And just like SARS-CoV-2, we have a single, standardised image of what we think it looks like on average. But in practice, if you look at them down an electron microscope, you can see a lot of variation. And in the case of influenza, when you take not just the ones which grow well in the lab but things which come out of human patients and out of animals, you can see that that variation extends into some really wild and wacky forms of virus which we still have very little idea of the role they play in infection.

So, in these wild and wacky forms, what's the scientific value of analysing the variation, the different shapes and sizes of the particles?

So the value ultimately is knowing what makes a virus infectious. So we have, as scientists always do, taken an extremely complex problem and broken it down into simple things that we can study. Famously, Peter Medoway said that you should always study the most important thing that you think you can solve. I'm paraphrasing slightly, but that's the idea. So we now have a very well worked out understanding of how influenza can infect a single cell. We have a reasonable understanding of how influenza infection spread through a human population from one person to the next at an epidemiological level. But what we don't really understand in much detail at all is when you have rounds of infection within a host and virus particles are tumbling out in high numbers and interacting with each other. What actually carries infectivity and causes it to propagate within the host? How do all these different, variable forms of virus particle contribute to an infection? So now we understand the basics, we can start layering in more and more layers of complexity and therefore get a better understanding of what makes the influenza infection really take off inside a host and how we can bring it under control.

That is fairly significant scientific and medical value. All right, now for the artistic value. Am I right in thinking there was something to do with Christmas decorations that sparked this for you?

Yeah. So this comes back again to working with children, or in this case, my own children, because this was many years after my PhD. So we were getting ready for Christmas, and here in Scotland, where I live and work as in many places where it snows at Christmas there's a traditional Christmas decoration where you fold up a piece of paper into a wedge and cut a design into it and then unfold it again to make a snowflake. And, probably because I had work on my mind while I was doing this, I was staring at these, thinking they do look a bit like viruses, and I started wondering why that was the case. And the answer is that there are some common ideas about symmetry which apply to both snowflakes and to viruses, and I thought, well, could you make some paper snowflake designs which helped you to understand viruses? And so I had to go at that. This was in 2019. And it was quite a small-scale, quiet thing which some virologists and some school groups got interested in, but was fairly low-key. o then, of course, in 2020, by the time Christmas came around again. Well, firstly, everyone was very interested in viruses, but also how to put this. It had been useful for my head to be able to spend a certain amount of time shut up quietly thinking about how to make paper designs rather than worrying about everything else. So a combination of those meant we were able to produce a much wider result, which we've continued to build on since, to help people understand some principles of virology through paper snowflake designs. It's been a fun project to be involved with.

This is brilliant, folks, folks. Biomedical visualisation begins at home. And, Ed, as a scientist, how do you see the value of biomedical visualisation? I mean the way you were talking there, you're also processing in a certain respect. More generally, is this something for scientists to communicate among themselves? Is it teaching students in science communication or reaching out to a more general public?

So the annoying answer to your question is yes, it's all of those things. So different people do think about the world in favoring different ways. I think I'm probably a fairly visual thinker in the way I try to build models about the world. But for almost all of us, it's useful to have the ability to construct mental images of what we're thinking about, and it's particularly important for viruses and other microscopic pathogens, where we're dealing with something which is profoundly important but also invisible. So being able to build visual representations which collect the information we need Um is important to everyone in different ways. It's important to people learning about science for the first time to introduce them to the key concepts. It's important to the general public for communication around pandemics and other public health threats, so that they can understand what we're all going through but also how to deal with it. It's also very important for people learning about science professionally and then developing our own ideas about science, because without a clear mental image of what's going on, it's very easy to start pursuing the wrong questions but also the process of building those models focuses your attention on the most important aspects of them. One of the most interesting aspects for me of biomedical illustration and one of the reasons why illustration has remained such an important discipline, despite the fact that we have, of course, so many techniques now for directly the appearance of things, is that you make selective choices. When you illustrate something, you have to focus on the most salient details, and by working out what those details are, you build a much more profound understanding of how a system works.

Important to be able to make something visible, especially as we very much felt on the ground at first. The pandemic is a kind of invisible threat and since then, of course, we've seen many images and stylised images of the coronavirus. How do you see this visualisation playing a role in the pandemic of the past two years?

So, I think right from the very beginning of the pandemic, visualisations have been extremely important. We were all, I think, very familiar with the striking visualisation developed by the Centers for Disease Control in America, the famous grey virus particle with red spikes over its surface, and that immediately helped to provide a visual reference for what this pandemic meant and for a lot of interesting aesthetic choices and what went into there as well, with the the reds being clearly used to communicate danger in people's minds. Um, and what was really interesting was the way in which other representations of the virus started to layer on additional levels of information. So, for example, David Goodsell, who is a structural biologist and biomedical illustrator working at the Scripps Institute, produced some fantastic illustrations which, and this is building on his career's worth of work, located that virus within the normal cell biology of a host and portrayed it clearly as a natural process. I was able to collaborate with Annabel Slater, a recently trained biomedical illustration from the Glasgow School of Art to build a model of a virus particle which incorporated more detail about what was going on inside it, and this was quite early in the pandemic. So at the time we were basing it on information from other related viruses, like the cause of the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s and also some related virus from mice, but we were able to start to picture what was inside the virus that way. That model has now become the journal identity for the Journal of General Virology, one of the specialist journals in the field. And over this time I got in contact with a biomedical illustrator, Sarah Iannucci, who had done a bit of work with David Goodsell but who was now looking for projects as part of her professional training, and I was able to put her in touch with a consortium in the UK, COG-UK, which brings together coronavirus genomics data, and this was taking extremely detailed information about SARS-CoV-2 for a professional audience, but it was also information which could be of interest to the general public. But of course it needed some sort of explanation to bridge that communication gap and to make it accessible to people without specialist scientific training in virology. So Sarah then set out to build an app which would help people to understand what was going on with variants of concern.

Ed, I'm very pleased that you mentioned Sarah Iannucci because I am particularly glad to welcome Sarah to the podcast series ESWI Airborne. Not only the first woman to be interviewed on ESWI Airborne so far, but also a woman with an absolutely super job title Biomedical Illustrator. Sarah, you are very welcome.

Sarah Iannucci: 16:38

Thanks so much for having me.

Sarah, I have to ask you first my burning question what does a biomedical illustrator do?

Yeah, absolutely. Biomedical illustrators are essentially professional artists who have specialised artistic and communication training and education in a variety of fields such as medicine and science. So, basically, we use a variety of techniques and technologies, from traditional media such as pencil and paint to more cutting edge technologies such as 3D modeling and virtual reality, to help communicate those complex scientific topics in a more visual way.

How did you first get interested in this field?

Yeah, so I've always been very involved with art. I think I've been drawing ever since I can remember, so it's always been a big part of my life. It wasn't really until high school that I kind of became more intrigued with the sciences and I really struggled kind of deciding where I was going to go in college, which one I would study. So I ended up pursuing a degree in biology first, and I always kind of kept art as more of like a side hobby. Then I eventually learned about the fields of biomedical illustration and it was kind of like a light bulb moment for me. So yeah, it just really perfectly combined those two interests into one field so well. So after that I started participating in a few scientific illustration workshops and then I ended up completing my master's degree in medical visualisation and human anatomy at the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow, which I actually just finished this past summer.

That is really marvellous. Yes, I think parents always tend to push you towards the sciences more than the arts when it comes to choosing a topic to study at third level, but it's certainly wonderful that you can combine both. Now, sarah, in terms of format, what are we talking about here? Ed was started off with Christmas decorations, but I think, from what you've said already, it's a bit more evolved than that, right, are we talking about hand drawings, painting? Is it all apps? What kind of formats are you using?

Yeah, so the range of work included in the biomedical illustration field is really quite wide and endless. As I said, the fields can include more traditional works such as pencil and paintings, but I think with the increasing use of digital technologies, there are a lot more doors opening for those techniques to be used for visually communicating those scientific topics. So this could include things like digital illustration using drawing tablets or using computer software to create digital 3D models and animations. There's also areas like augmented reality, or AR, and virtual reality, or VR, which combine digital visualisations in with the real world. So I think there's like a huge variety of formats that can be used in the field.

I's really exciting, isn't it? It's wide open. Ed, if I can bring you in, but I'd like to hear from Sarah first. The old question, how did you meet?

Yeah, so I actually met Ed at the beginning of my master's degree. So I was participating in Cell Space, which is a guided workshop for cellular and molecular scientific art. It was run by David Goodsell, who's a really prominent scientific illustrator specialising in structural biology illustrations. So the focus of the workshop was to create a COVID-19 related artwork in order to help kind of communicate important topics related to the virus and the pandemic itself. So I was working on a painting for that workshop showing the process of how soap surfactants interact with the SARS-CoV-2 viral membrane. And as I was kind of posting my early stages in the process of my painting on Twitter, that's kind of how I came into contact with Ed.

Ed what caught your eye?

I mean, as Sarah said, the first thing I came across that she'd done was this fantastic picture, painting rather, of SARS-CoV-2 being inactivated by surfactants, and I really would encourage people to go to her website and have a look at it. It is a fantastic example of how biomedical illustration can really help, because it takes something which is quite complicated to visualise, even if you're a professional in the field, and distills it into a really straightforward image which everyone can grasp. I think, actually, the first time I reached out to you, Sarah, it was to ask if I could include it in some of my final year undergraduate teaching, because it was just such a clear way of explaining this very basic thing of why washing your hands makes a big difference for, for these envelope viruses. And at this point, it became clear that Sarah was about to enroll on a course run collaboratively between the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow, where I work myself, so there were some opportunities for us to collaborate. However, a very 2022 now, part of that answer is we haven't actually met yet. We've been working together quite a lot over the last year, and next week, at the moment of recording, we're going to be in the same place at the same time for a conference where Sarah will be presenting some of her work, and that will actually be the first time we've met in person. So, we've been able to do a lot through first social media and then, later on, remote working, but, yeah, we still haven't quite met in person. We will soon, hopefully.

This is indeed very 2022, working intensely with people that you've never actually been in the same room as. Nonetheless, you have worked together. What was the first formal project you worked together on? Sarah?

Yeah. So after coming into contact with Ed during the early stages of my master's degree, I knew that I'd be interested in working together again on a more virus-related thesis project for my degree towards the end of it. So we decided that a SARS-CoV-2 related project aimed at a general audience could be very impactful just given how topical the virus is, of course. So we developed the project around visualising SARS-CoV-2 spike protein mutations and variants of concern. So it was during that time that we developed an online app, and it contains an interactive 3D model of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Inside the app as well, there's also information and 3D animations just showing how mutations of the protein can impact viral properties.

Ed who's this app for?

It was developed to take the information presented by COG-UK, who, as I mentioned before, are a consortium of scientists working together to collect information about virus genome sequences and to make that information understandable to people who are not already professional virologists. So there's a lot of things in there that we care about, both for interested members of the public, but we thought this might also be useful for people who were professionally communicating about science, so science journalists, who might, for example, realise that a new variant was spreading and want a quick way of understanding what that meant, perhaps getting some good quality illustrations to explain it. And in fact, this was very much the situation we came in because Sarah finished her project, wrote it all up, submitted her thesis, and then omicron happened and despite the fact she was, by this point, gainfully employed doing some other biomedical stuff, she very kindly made time in evenings and weekends to very rapidly build in an additional omicron extension to the work she was doing. So it's uh, um, yeah, hopefully a tool which will allow people who aren't professionally immersed in this every day to say well, okay, new mutants have appeared. It's changing the way we live, but why is that the case? How does that fit into how this, this virus, is working?

It's very true, working as a journalist, coming across these kind of resources, it's absolutely invaluable. What are you working on together now?

So we've still been working on promoting my thesis project, so we have a book chapter and journal article in the works and, as Ed said, I'll also be presenting the project as a poster at the 2022 Microbiology Society conference next week actually. So, aside from that, we're in the early stages of exploring some maybe influencer-related visualisation projects, such as using 3D models that were developed in other projects that Ed had been a part of in the past, so hopefully using these to create some new impactful images and maybe some animations as well.

As is often the case with these projects, getting one thing to work opens the doors for more things to work as well. So Sarah mentioned there's some models which are developed by a previous student on the course, Naina Naya, and through this there's hopefully opportunities to bring those together with with Sarah's work. Uh, similarly, some of the other models we've developed have been incorporated into augmented reality apps by yet another student in the course, Rachel Suey, and hopefully the app for that, visible viruses, will be available for public download quite soon. You can get a beta version at the moment from the website, but we should hopefully have the full version of that soon too. So, as with all these things, once you've got something in place, it's possible to build on it and communicate more and to explore new ideas, and that's been a really exciting thing to be able to do through these collaborations.

This really seems like a field of work that is changing and developing very rapidly and very rich with potential, more potential. Where do you see the most activity, Ed?

I think that plays out in different ways for different fields, but what I have been struck by in terms of the people I've had the good fortune to collaborate with, is the growing use and accessibility of augmented reality and virtual reality to take these 3D visualisation techniques and to bring them into um people's consciousness, I suppose, in new and interesting ways. That's a very new area for me and actually a lot of what's possible there has been led by the people I have collaborated with who I think, have a much better idea than I, of what the potential there is. But, as Sarah said, there's a spread now of media. The old, traditional media have not been left behind, but there are now an increasing range of new technology-driven approaches which can be used to help people to really understand what these things are like.

Augmented reality is certainly a very compelling medium, Sarah, would you agree? Do you see a lot of potential here?

Yeah, I have not worked too in-depth with AR before, but definitely seems really really valuable to the field. Just that having that immersion of the digital technology and with your kind of world can really kind of you can just see things in a new light. I think, yeah, Rachel's app for sure really really highlights that with with viruses and learning about them.

Do you have any big dreams of projects that you'd really love to do?

I think, in my case, the big dream for visualisation which is one you'd have to approach incrementally is being able to visualise what's happening at a microscopic scale within an infected cell, and we've always tended to approach this through simplification, because it's such a complex environment and that need to simplify things, I think is actually almost misled us sometimes even as professional scientists, informing a mental image of what's going on there. David Goodsell, who we've both mentioned multiple times, is perhaps best known, I think, for his work in helping people to understand how much the molecular world is crowded and dynamic and packed with complexity and rapid movement in a way which we tend to strip away and simplify in order to understand what's going on. So to be able to produce a detailed model of what molecular biology actually looks like inside a cell and how that's perturbed by viral infection would be hugely useful both for the public and understanding what's going on there, but also for professional scientists in terms of building better models of how infection processes work. People are making impressive steps in that direction, but there's a lot of things which need to get into place for that to work. It's at its most effectively and I think lots of groups are going to be able to to help to develop our detailed understanding of the world in that way.

Sarah, how about you? Do you have any big dreams of what next?

o, personally, for projects that I'd like to do there, there are so many, it's really hard to narrow it down because I'm just interested in so many different fields. But I'm definitely more interested or I'm definitely quite interested in pursuing more virus visualisation projects. So hopefully me and Ed can work together some more on on these as time goes on. I'm also really interested in anatomy visualisation, but I also get a lot of experience with this already, which is 3D modeling anatomy, in my current job as a medical visualisation engineer with axial 3D. So yeah, aside from that, I think I'm just hoping for new opportunities and topics to emerge as I keep freelancing as a biomedical illustrator as well.

I have a feeling there are going to be many, many more opportunities than you will ever be able to take advantage of. So that brings us to our last question, and you know, I'm Irish and we sometimes say that the best question is one that has no answer at all, but I'm going to throw this one in anyway. What can artists and scientists learn from one another? Ed, do you want to kick us off with this?

Maybe the best answer is to give multiple answers to the question with no answer. I think there are a number of different ways in which these different disciplines can intersect. And it's perhaps worth examining the difference between illustration and more interpretive artistic responses to projects as well. So there are some projects which are very much led by artists producing artistic responses which are informed by science. There are other ones and this is, I think, very much more the sort of work which Sarah and I've been collaborating on where there's a scientific topic which needs to be effectively communicated, and the way to communicate that is through producing better visual representations of what's going on and more creative and dynamic visual illustrations. Both of these things are hugely important, though they're tackling different aspects of how we respond to the natural world in the case of illustration, in terms of how we respond to understanding it. In the case of artistic responses, perhaps how we relate to it in the process of living through it. But both of those are opportunities for scientists and artists to really draw on each other's skill sets to build the ideas I want to build.

Sarah, how about you?

Yeah, echoing what Ed said, I think there's just a massive opportunity for artists and scientists to kind of join forces and collaborate on visualising different scientific topics. So I think it can just be really difficult for those that don't necessarily have a strong scientific education or any at all to understand complex scientific issues. So I think clear and impactful communication is key for that. So biomedical illustrators can really act as, you know, visual problem solvers, for scientists, turning that really complex information into a more comprehensible visual format. So I kind of personally think that science and art should always go hand in hand.

Hand in hand. Indeed, they do, at least in this collaboration. Sarah, Ed, thank you so much for being in the studio today. I wish you all the best. I know you'll really enjoy finally meeting each other in person for the first time next week and in continuing what is clearly a very fruitful collaboration.

Clare, thank you very much.

Thanks so much for having us.

Dear listeners, that brings us to the end of today's episode on visualising viruses. Certainly, the pictures are better on the radio and also right here on ESWI Airborne. Keep on tuning in to ESWI Airborne, the viral podcast series, for all the latest on pandemics, vaccination, influenza, viruses and more. Get your information directly from the members of ESWI the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza. Until next time, folks stay safe.

Aida Bakri: 34:08

ESWI Airborne is brought to you by ESWI, the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza and Other Acute Respiratory Viruses. These episodes would not be possible without the team's efforts and we would like to extend special thanks to our ESWI secretariat, our technical and IT teams, our arts team and our host, Clare Taylor. The podcasts are recorded virtually and we thank our guests for their participation in this inspiring series. Talks are adapted to a global audience and are intended to be educational. For any specific medical questions you may have, these should be addressed to your local general practitioner. Many thanks to our sponsoring partners and thank you for listening.

Visualising Viruses

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