(CNN) What started out as another project at work has turned into the face of a global pandemic.

When medical illustrators Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started working on an illustration of the novel coronavirus, little did they realize that it would be the image people around the country and the world would see every day during the pandemic.

After the CDC's emergency operations center was activated in late January, Eckert and Higgins were told they needed to get an image of the virus out to the public. They sprang into action immediately, starting by researching the structure of the virus and consulting with subject matter experts in the lab at CDC, Eckert said.

Once they got that information, the illustrators turned to the Protein Data Bank on the web. The data bank is a database of three-dimensional structural data of large biological molecules, like proteins and nucleic acids.

"Using the research of the protein data bank of the virus, we were then able to compile the necessary data to construct the viral structure into a 3D environment," Higgins said. "We downloaded this data into visualization software. Took the parts we needed, optimized them, then took them into 3D software."

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