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Front cover illustration

Bluetongue virus (BTV) is the causative agent of an economically important disease of sheep (bluetongue), outbreaks of which have occurred annually since 1998 across much of the Mediterranean region, including North Africa, southern and south eastern Europe. The atomic structure of the BTV core has been determined to atomic resolution by X-ray crystallography, demonstrating that the viral genome is packaged as highly ordered concentric shells (Gouet et al., Cell 97, 481-490, 1999) within a subcore capsid composed of 120 molecules of the virus structural protein VP3, displaying T=2 symmetry, and surrounded by an outer core shell composed of 780 copies of virus structural protein VP7, arranged with T=13l symmetry (Grimes et al., Nature 395, 470-478, 1998). The BTV core, which is an active biochemical machine that can simultaneously synthesize mRNA copies of each of the ten dsRNA genome segments (Diprose et al., EMBO J 20, 7229-7239, 2001), remains the largest structure that has been determined to atomic resolution to date. Image kindly provided by Peter Mertens (Institute for Animal Health, Pirbright Laboratory, UK) and Jonathan Diprose (Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, Division of Structural Biology, University of Oxford, UK). For recent research on bluetongue virus, see also articles by H. Takamatsu et al., J Gen Virol 84, 227-235 , 2003 and E. M. Karger et al. on pages 727-732 of this issue.