Timeline for Is it possible for a bioaerosol/virus to be quickly detected?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
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| Oct 25, 2022 at 21:51 | comment | added | Ottie | @JohnO true, it wouldn’t be the virus making the protein, but if you fuse the fluorescent protein with a structural capsid component, it will end up packaged into the physical structure of the virus. Lyssavirus are pretty big, GFP is not particularly humongous, and smaller fluorophores have been developed if that’s a concern. The resulting virus does glow, even though its DNA doesn’t. The poor hijacked cell doesn’t really get a say into what it’s producing. | |
| Oct 25, 2022 at 15:18 | comment | added | John O | Viruses can't do this, as far as I'm aware. They're not biological organisms... the DNA itself doesn't glow, it just codes for proteins that do. Large, humongous proteins... the sort of thing you probably can't expect the hijacked (soon-to-be-dead) cell to manufacture... and if it did, the virus wouldn't have any place to put it (these things tend to get in the way of cell receptor or so I thought). | |
| Oct 25, 2022 at 7:08 | comment | added | Ottie | @ETam agreed, slapping a GFP into anything you’re genetically modifying for a matter of convenience is so common that I’d almost be surprised if they hadn’t done it (assuming it doesn’t interfere with capsid packing due to bulk, but lyssavirus are big). The rabies virus (which is the only lyssavirus that commonly infects primates, iirc) in particular is often modified in the lab to carry fluorescent taggers and “light up” the neurons they infect, in order to visualise neural tracts. There are loads of fluorescent rhabdovirus constructs in labs already. | |
| Oct 23, 2022 at 12:22 | comment | added | Nepene Nep | " the same way the propane gas, naturally odorless, can be detected because of artificially added odorants?" op said you could artificially add something to make it easier to detect. | |
| Oct 23, 2022 at 10:35 | comment | added | Goodies | Only issue is.. what if the virus strain that escaped has not been modified to do this ? You can't enforce the mutation afterward.. when this virus was developed as a weapon, it is not plausible they would build it in beforehand, making the weapon clearly visible. | |
| Oct 22, 2022 at 23:49 | comment | added | E Tam | It is worth noting that adding fluorescent markers like this is an extremely common technique in microbiology. The basic idea is that counting the number of virions (individual molecules of a virus) in a sample is very hard, but measuring how much the sample fluoresces under UV light is very easy, so if you make the virions fluoresce a spectrometer can tell you the concentration of virons in a sample in seconds. | |
| Oct 22, 2022 at 23:21 | history | answered | Nepene Nep | CC BY-SA 4.0 |