Thursday, May 8, 2014

What matters more, multiplicity of infection or virus concentration?

Virology question of the week

"My professor recently said that really, the MOI doesn’t matter in a culture, it is the concentration of viral particles in the media that matters. Ie: if you have 10 million cells or one cell, but you are infecting the plate with 5mL of 100 million viral particles/mL, then the amount of virus interacting with each cell is not different in either scenario (pretending that it isn’t nearly impossible for that single cell to survive in culture alone). I argued with him, saying that the cytotoxicity to the single cell would certainly be increased. He then said that a student hadn’t argued with him about that in his 15 years of teaching and I promptly decided to get some evidence before I continued the discussion."

If you have two plates with equal numbers of cells, and you add 5 mL of media to one and 50mL of media to the other – assuming that the media is 100 million infectious particles/mL – would the higher MOI plate not result in more infectious events per cell?

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What matters more, multiplicity of infection or virus concentration?




Source: Virology blog
Image credits: Laboratory equipment

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