Femtosecond Laser Shatters Viruses

wattrlz writes "In a development reminiscent of nineteenth century pseudo-science, the father-son team of Kong Thon and Shaw Wei Tsen recently demonstrated that the tobacco mosaic virus can be destroyed in vitro by nano-scale mechanical resonant vibrations induced by repeated ultra-short pulses from a laser. The total energy required is reportedly far below the threshold for human tissue damage and the technique should generalize to human pathogens. Cleaning stored blood is one obvious application."

Comments

Danger of re-self-assembly and evolution?

[G4from128k]

First, This will only work if the resonance breaks the bonds inside the proteins that create the subunits that self-assemble into the viral capsids. If the resonance only separates the weakly-bound subunits, then the resulting fragments will tend to re-self-assemble into whole viruses again. To use a bricks and mortar analogy -- if the device only breaks the mortar, the bricks can reused. The trick is to break the bricks.

Second, this solution requires a specific pulse frequency for each virus. It's not a broad-spectrum disinfectant. That suggests that viruses can easily evolve to defeat the device. Mutants that add a few non-functional amino acids to their capsid protein chains or that decorate the capsid surface with different biochemical groups would change the resonant frequency and allow mutants to escape and breed. One can even imagine evolution selecting for viruses that have inherent damping so that no resonant frequency can build enough energy to disrupt the shell. For example, a virus might become effectively heterozygous so that its shell is randomly constructed of two slightly different subunit sequences. A capsid that is not perfectly crystalline would lack a strong resonant frequency and escape disruption.

Overall, this looks like a very promising weapon in the on-going arms race against viruses.