Scientists Record a Virus 'Prowling' Cells in Search of a Way Inside

For the first time, scientists have been able to make a three-dimensional, real-time recording of the moment a virus hijacks a cell.

The film lasts two and a half minutes and shows a genetically sterile virus that is thousands of times smaller than a grain of sand.

Understanding how viruses break into cells is important in working out better ways of defending against them, but tracking them is difficult because they are so small.

It's like you're trying to take a picture of a person in front of a building. It's not possible to see the details of the person in front of the skyscraper with a single picture.

It's even more difficult to come up with a process that can deal with the different sizes and speeds of virus particles because they move so fast outside the cell.

There is a system called 3D-TrIm that can be used to solve this problem. It's basically two microscopes in one, the first to lock on to the particle and the second to take 3D pictures of the surrounding cells. It's similar to a satellite navigation app that tracks your car's location in the middle of a larger landscape.

With the virus particle illuminated via a special fluorescent label, it's position can be plotted 1,000 times a second, giving researchers a look at its movements in unprecedented detail.

The meandering path of the virus can be seen in the video below.

People ask if the work is a video game or a simulation when they see it. This is from a real microscope.

We're all breathing in millions of viruses every day, the vast majority of which fail to do any harm, but scientists want to learn more about how certain viruses break through the protective layer of cells and mucus

Though it has its limitations, this new 3D-Trim method should help, though it needs to be labeled before it can be seen, and fluorescent dye needs to be engineered to last long enough to allow researchers to track the whole infection process.

The potential for the system to get better quickly and be adapted to other types of medical diagnostics is something the team behind 3D-Trim believes.

The technique can be applied to any system where fast dynamics of nanoscale objects occur over large volumetric scales, including delivery of nanoscale drug candidates to the lungs and through tumor vasculature.

The research was published in a journal.