Via the South China Morning Post: Coronavirus: constantly surprising virus found to be heat tolerant, self-healing and very resilient in lab tests. Excerpt:
A research team in Hungary pinched the coronavirus with a fine needle to measure how much force it could take before popping like a balloon.
It did not.
The native virion of Sars-CoV-2 – a complete virus particle – was only about 80 nanometres wide, and the needle tip was much smaller than that. The tip drove from the top of the virus to the bottom. The virion was squashed, then immediately rebounded as the needle left.
The researchers repeated the drill 100 times and the same viral particle remained almost intact.
It is “surprisingly resilient,” said the team led by Dr Miklos Kellermayer of Semmelweis University in Budapest in a non-peer-reviewed paper posted on biorxiv.org on Thursday.
The new coronavirus has constantly surprised scientists with its unique structure. For instance, a team from Tsinghua University in Beijing released the most detailed structural reconstruction of the virus in the journal Cell this week with the discovery that the virus could pile a large amount of nucleic acid ribbon that carries genetic data into a very tight envelope without the two becoming entangled.
However, the virus used in this and other previous studies was frozen to obtain a sharp, stable shot for the camera.
Kellermayer’s team captured how the virus behaved when it was alive. They put the viral particles on a tray coated with a biological binding material.
The material could fix the virus in position. Under a laser-emitting atomic force microscope, the scientists played around with the virus with a needle to see how it responded to various stimuli.
A virus usually becomes vulnerable after leaving the host. But according to some studies, Sars-CoV-2 could stay on some everyday surfaces such as cupboards for several days.
How it managed to survive environmental disturbances remained unclear.
The Hungarian team found the viral envelope barely gave any resistance as the needle tip landed on the surface. As the tip went further, the resisting force peaked and then quickly diminished to almost non-existent.
Their experimental data suggested Sars-Cov-2 could be the most physically elastic virus ever known to humans so far, and repeated deformation did not seem to affect the overall structure and the content inside the virus, either.
“Its mechanical and self-healing properties may ensure adaptation to a wide range of environmental circumstances,” said Kellermayer and colleagues.
