Arista-Romero Maria, Pujals Silvia, Albertazzi Lorenzo
Nanoscopy for Nanomedicine Group, Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Barcelona, Spain.
Department of Electronics and Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Physics, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2021 Mar 26;9:647874. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2021.647874. eCollection 2021.
In the last year the COVID19 pandemic clearly illustrated the potential threat that viruses pose to our society. The characterization of viral structures and the identification of key proteins involved in each step of the cycle of infection are crucial to develop treatments. However, the small size of viruses, invisible under conventional fluorescence microscopy, make it difficult to study the organization of protein clusters within the viral particle. The applications of super-resolution microscopy have skyrocketed in the last years, converting this group into one of the leading techniques to characterize viruses and study the viral infection in cells, breaking the diffraction limit by achieving resolutions up to 10 nm using conventional probes such as fluorescent dyes and proteins. There are several super-resolution methods available and the selection of the right one it is crucial to study in detail all the steps involved in the viral infection, quantifying and creating models of infection for relevant viruses such as HIV-1, Influenza, herpesvirus or SARS-CoV-1. Here we review the use of super-resolution microscopy (SRM) to study all steps involved in the viral infection and antiviral design. In light of the threat of new viruses, these studies could inspire future assays to unveil the viral mechanism of emerging viruses and further develop successful antivirals against them.
在过去一年里，新冠疫情清楚地表明了病毒对我们社会构成的潜在威胁。病毒结构的表征以及对感染周期每个步骤中涉及的关键蛋白质的识别对于开发治疗方法至关重要。然而，病毒体积小，在传统荧光显微镜下不可见，这使得研究病毒颗粒内蛋白质簇的组织变得困难。近年来，超分辨率显微镜的应用激增，使其成为表征病毒和研究细胞中病毒感染的领先技术之一，通过使用荧光染料和蛋白质等传统探针实现高达10纳米的分辨率，突破了衍射极限。有几种超分辨率方法可供选择，选择合适的方法对于详细研究病毒感染的所有步骤、量化并创建相关病毒（如HIV-1、流感病毒、疱疹病毒或SARS-CoV-1）的感染模型至关重要。在此，我们综述了超分辨率显微镜（SRM）在研究病毒感染和抗病毒设计所有步骤中的应用。鉴于新病毒的威胁，这些研究可能会激发未来的检测方法，以揭示新兴病毒的病毒机制，并进一步开发针对它们的成功抗病毒药物。
