The rapid increase in COVID-19 cases across the world has a reason
- The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the dreadful infection is extremely resilient and can survive on surfaces much longer than expected. This is because it has a very hard outer shell that protects its protein content from external environmental impacts. A recent study has explained why we are faced with this kind of a virus.
- A study published by Elsevier’s Microbial Pathogenesis has found that the outer membrane protein of the virus has a very low percentage of intrinsic disorder, or PID.
- The membrane denoted as ‘M’ has a PID of just 6 per cent, which means that the outer shell is extremely hard — one of the hardest among the family of corona viruses. The hardness of the shell — denoted as ‘M PID’ — determines how long the virus can remain outside the body, and also survive within body fluids.
- The harder outer shell plays a greater and more immediate role in protecting the virion from environmental damage as it encases the entire virion.
- As a result, an infected person is likely to shed greater numbers of viral particles that remain active longer to infect others. Which is why the importance of wearing proper masks and maintaining physical distance from one another.
- SARS-CoV-2 is able to remain is able to remain infectious in the infectious in the environment for the longest environment for the longest time regardless of being in time regardless of being in residues of faeces, mucus, residues of faeces, mucus, vomit, sweat, or salivavomit, sweat, or saliva
- Because of its very hard outer shell, SARS-CoV-2 is likely to be more resistant to antimicrobial enzymes in body fluids
- Viruses that are notorious for lasting in the environment for a long time such as the smallpox virus, have low outer shell PIDs -- lower the outer shell PID, harder the shell
- The study was conducted by an international team of researchers from Centre for Computational Biology & Bioinformatics, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis; Department of Biological Sciences, University of Idaho; Institute for Biological Instrumentation, Russian Academy of Sciences,Russia; and Goh’s Bio Computing, Singapore.