New York, Dec 31
Is your toddler suffering from bad cold again? It could be respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
A new high-end imaging technology studying the structure of the RSV virion and its activity in living cells could help researchers unlock the secrets of the virus - how it enters cells, replicates, how many genomes it inserts into its hosts and perhaps why certain lung cells escape the infection relatively unscathed.
"We want to develop tools that would allow us to get at how the virus really works," said Philip Santangelo, associate professor at Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
"We really need to be able to follow the infection in a single living cell without affecting how the virus infects its hosts, and this technology should allow us to do that," he added.
Using direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (dSTORM) imaging, they were able to characterise some aspects of the virus particle itself at super-resolution, down to 20 nanometers.
by:IANS