Vanderbilt University structural biologist Gerald Stubbs, the study's lead author, said flexible filamentous viruses make up a large fraction of known plant viruses and cause more than half the viral damage to the world's crop plants but details of their structures were poorly understood.

Now, using a variety of sophisticated imaging techniques at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborating institutions, those structures have been detailed and that, said the scientists, might benefit researchers interested in using viruses as agents of biotechnology to coax plants to produce other useful products, such as pharmaceuticals.

"These are very important viruses and we knew almost nothing about their detailed structure before these studies," said Stubbs. "If you are to come up with any molecular way of combating these plant diseases, you need to know the details of their structures."

The study, which included researchers from the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Kentucky, appears in the Journal of Virology.