Visit to SUSTech and Some More COVID Evidence

 Today the school sponsored a trip to the Southern University of Science and Technology to visit the school's cryo-EM lab. It was a good trip and we got to see a lot of the stuff that they had in the lab...although the younger kids were more interested in the smart glass window. Having worked with microscopes I was also excited to see some more advanced apparatus.

They had a bunch of their published research up on the board...one paper interested me: "The Architecture of Inactivated SARS-CoV-2 with Postfusion Spikes Revealed by Cryo-EM and Cryo-ET" by C. Liu et al. (Link here, open access: https://www.cell.com/structure/fulltext/S0969-2126(20)30372-5) While I was not extremely concerned with the imaging of the virus (which was the real highlight of the paper), one diagram in the "Isolation and Identification" section was interesting:

The caption was, "Viral RNAs were extracted from the cell culture supernatant and detected using a commercial kit probing the ORF 1ab (red) and N (blue) genes of SARS-CoV-2." In a nutshell, "the concentration of viral RNA". Remember this? 

This was back in 2022 when I did some work regarding COVID cases and the trend of the cases with the data I had (link https://patrickkangblog.blogspot.com/2023/11/try-to-predict-covid19-case.html). The curve for the patient cases is almost exactly the same as the curve for the viral molecules. This means that viruses multiplying on a macro scale are similar to viruses multiplying on a micro scale.