04/05/2021
Physics Role Over Fighting a Pandemic (Review article)
Structural Biology- the study of the structure and function of biological macromolecules- has come a long way. Modern Techniques, such as automation and Cryo– Electron Microscopy (Cryo- EM), mean that viral structures can be identified almost instantly in many cases. “ Structural biology has reached the stage where it’s fast enough for almost anything “. But is it fast enough to halt a Pandemic?
Physics based techniques plays a huge role in the field of structural biology. The vast majority of biological macromolecule structure are obtained by X-ray Crystallography ( determining atomic and molecular structure of crystal).Single biological molecules also diffract X-rrays, but only very weakly. Crystallization, is helpful because it results in the repetition of huge numbers of molecules in an ordered, 3D lattice, so that all their tiny signals reinforce one another and become detectable- by photographic plates in the early days and by active pixels detectors today. These signals are merely the sum of contributions of X-rays diffracted from different part of the molecules- the Fourier Transform.
Current synchrotrons and ever newer free- electron lasers-which extracts diffraction data from molecular crystals in the few fem to seconds before they are annihilated-employ techniques such as serial crystallography to build up a complete diffraction dataset from numerous partial dataset of crystals. The analysis of SARS-CoV-2 is a prime example of this type of modern pipeline in action.
On 5th Feb, 2020,a research team led by Zihe Rao and Haitao Yang at Shanghai Tech University in China uploaded the structure of Virus main protease to the protein data bank ( DOI:10.2210/pdb6lu7/pdb), having obtained the dataset using X-ray Crystallography at the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility.
The latest Novel Coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has reached the pandemic status. While health workers and government do their part, it is a short/ brief review article on how physics plays an important role in fighting over Novel Coronavirus called as SARS -CoV-2 from its beginning pandemic phase ( “ Pandemic” officially designated on 11th March , 2020) and its resultant disease, COVID-19.
( Stay up to date with the latest breakthrough in materials science from the No.1 science news service).
( Physics World.com/ materials)
Safe Everyone
