A team of researchers in Hungary poked the COVID-19 coronavirus with a fine needle to measure how much force it needed before it ‘popped’ like a balloon. It wasn’t destroyed.
The ‘body’ of Sars-CoV-2 (the name of the virus that causes COVID-19) is about 80 nanometers wide, and the tip of the needle the researchers are using is much smaller than that. The tip goes from the top of the virus to the bottom. The virion was pinched, then immediately ‘bounced’ as the needle left.
The researchers repeated this 100 times on the same virus particle and it remains almost intact.
It is “very tough,” said the team led by Dr Miklos Kellermayer from Semmelweis University in Budapest in an un-peer-reviewed paper posted on biorxiv.org on Thursday 17 September 2020, as quoted from Asia One, Saturday (19 / 9/2020).
The new coronavirus that causes COVID-19 continues to surprise scientists with its unique structure. For example, a team from Tsinghua University in Beijing released the most detailed structural reconstruction of the virus in the journal Cell this week. They found that viruses can accumulate large amounts of nucleic acid bands that carry genetic data into tightly packed wraps.
However, the viruses used in this study and other previous studies were frozen in order to get a sharp and steady shot for the camera.
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