If you’re anything like me, you spend a significant portion of the day wondering about the paths viruses take when they’re cruising around your internals…<\/b>
\nIf you\u2019 re anything like me, you spend a significant portion of the day wondering about the paths viruses take when they\u2019 re cruising around your internals. Luckily for us, a newly developed microscope from Duke researchers can show the exact path taken by the little critters (?) , down to the micrometer.
The system, designed by a team led by assistant professor Kevin Welsher, isn\u2019 t like a traditional microscope. Instead of magnifying an image using natural or augmented light, it scans a laser through a small volume repeatedly and from multiple angles. This illuminates special fluorescent particles, the positions of which can be tracked over time.
Attach one of those particles to something else and you can track what it\u2019s doing. It\u2019s kind of like a mocap studio for microbiology. But until recently those particles were too big to attach to viruses \u2014 imagine trying to do your Gollum impression with basketballs taped all over your body. Welsher\u2019s team recently improved the power of the system enough that it can detect much smaller dots \u2014 and even fluorescent proteins built right into the virus\u2019s system. The result, as you see up top, is quite a detailed little track!
I\u2019 m reminded of the old Family Circus cartoons, with Billy or whoever going all over the neighborhood, petting dogs, tracking mud on the neighbor\u2019s porch, and so on. Except Billy is a lentivirus, and the neighborhood is the soupy exterior of a cell membrane.
It\u2019s not all just for kicks, of course: the goal is to be able to watch as a virus makes contact with a cell and does whatever it does to penetrate and infect it. That moment, so critical to understanding viral behavior, is poorly understood because it\u2019s been nearly impossible to observe directly.
\u201cWhat we are trying to investigate is the very first contacts of the virus with the cell surface \u2014 how it calls receptors, and how it sheds its envelope, \u201d said Welsher in a Duke news release . \u201cWe want to watch that process in real time, and to do that, we need to be able to lock on to the virus right from the first moment.\u201d
With this system, we\u2019 re a step closer to understanding one of the most sophisticated biological machines ever created. The team\u2019s work is published this week in the journal of the Optical Society.<\/p>\n

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Sentiment rank: 0.8<\/div>\n

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