A breakthrough in the understanding of the properties of nuclear structure has been achieved by an international team of scientists comprising researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, University of Munster in Germany, and Institute of Nuclear Physics at the Polish Academy of Sciences. The team, from the nCTEQ collaboration investigating nuclear parton (quark and gluon) distribution functions, developed a quark-gluon model that combined low-energy and high-energy concepts to reproduce the properties of atomic nuclei.