For their first attempt to reverse engineer a life form in a computer program, computational biologists selected the satellite tobacco mosaic virus because of its simplicity and small size.

The satellite virus they chose is a spherical RNA sub-viral agent that is so small and simple that it can only proliferate in a cell already hijacked by a helper virus – in this case the tobacco mosaic virus that is a serious threat to tomato plants.

A computer program was used to reverse engineer the dynamics of all atoms making up the virus and a small drop of salt water surrounding it. The virus and water contain more than a million atoms altogether.

The necessary calculation was done at Illinois on one of the world’s largest and fastest computers operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The computer simulations provided an unprecedented view into the dynamics of the virus.