TWiV 171: One is the loneliest number

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On episode #171 of the podcast This Week in Virology, Matt Frieman joins Vincent, Alan, and Dickson to review virus production in single cells and single virion genomics.

You can find TWiV #171 at www.microbe.tv/twiv.

4 thoughts on “TWiV 171: One is the loneliest number”

  2. Connor Bamford

    You didn’t first learn about the single virus genomics paper from my blog last April? http://ruleof6ix.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/single-virus-genomics-future-of-virus.html 

    Great idea but I wonder how easy it would be to isolate/manipulate different kinds of viruses – I’m thinking small, capsid-bound viruses like polio versus the larger enveloped particles of influenza or measles? 

  3. Matt Frieman

    Connor, 

    Ha! I didn’t see it on your website, I guess you beat us to the punch.  I think it would be interesting to see how small a virus you could isolate with this technique.  I would also like to see it work by just labelling the outside of the virion instead of growing the virus in the presence of dye.  Then you really could do non-cultivatable virus sequencing.

    M

  4. Connor Bamford

    I’m always on the look out for those kind of papers – plus, the title really stood out and sounded cool!

    I thought they just mixed the virion preps with the SYBR green:

    “ Viral particle suspensions were stained with SYBR Green I (Invitrogen) and sorted onto polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) printed microscope slides (Electron Microscopy Sciences).”

    What I would be worried about is that if you’re doing this to discover new viruses, how will this method skew the kinds of viruses you detect? I.e does Sybr Green stain RNA viruses? Maybe this method might destroy infectivity of larger enveloped viruses?

    Still, the possibilities are great!

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