A viral infection can stress cells and change their shapes and sizes. Researchers have built a tool to detect these changes.
About
It can detect if cells have been infected by a virus using only light and some knowledge of high-school physics.
A viral infection can stress cells and change their shapes, sizes, and features. As the infection gains the upper hand and the body becomes ‘diseased’, the changes become starker.
The researchers behind the new study translated these cellular changes into patterns that could be used to say if a cell had been infected.
The method can differentiate between uninfected, virus-infected, and dead cells.
Virus-infected cells were elongated and had more clear boundaries than uninfected cells.
Significance
Light-based methods could detect viral infections as accurately or even more accurately than the standard method.
The new method was also cheaper than the standard: while the equipment cost for the standard method using chemical reagents is about $3,000 (Rs 2.5 lakh), the cost of the new method described in this paper was about a tenth.
The new method takes only about two hours to detect virus-infected cells, against the 40 hours the current standard requires.
The new method could help catch viral infections early — which could be very helpful during, say, a virulent bird flu outbreak.
