People at high risk from rhinoviruses, like children with asthma or adults with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, would benefit greatly from new drugs, Dr. Miller said, and should therefore be populations of interest to the drug industry.

Dr. Liggett said the new data might even provide an opportunity to consider new vaccine approaches.

Dr. Palmenberg is less optimistic. “There’s not going to be a vaccine for the common cold,” she said, given that vaccines do not protect the linings of the nose where the virus attacks.

The rhinovirus has a genome of about 7,000 chemical units, which encode the information to make the 10 proteins that do everything the virus needs to infect cells and make more viruses.

By comparing the 99 genomes with one another, the researchers were able to arrange them in a family tree based on similarities in their genomes.

That family tree shows that some regions of the rhinovirus genome are changing all the time but that others never change.

The fact that the unchanging regions are so conserved over the course of evolutionary time means that they perform vital roles and that the virus cannot let them change without perishing. They are therefore ideal targets for drugs because, in principle, any of the 99 strains would succumb to the same drug.

Dr. Liggett said he believed that one such target lies at the very beginning of the rhinovirus genome, where its genetic material is folded into a clover-leaf shape. The sequence of units in the clover leaf is designed to be read quickly by the infected cell’s protein-making machinery. All strains of rhinovirus have much the same sequence of units at this region and all could be vulnerable to the same drug.