The Martlet

A new technology developed by a team of UVic researchers may provide a great leap forward in the field of viral research.

The technology, developed in collaboration with researchers at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO)in Spain, uses light to trap, manipulate and study objects as small as viruses.

UVic engineering professor Reuven Gordon, who was on an exchange with the ICFO and who worked on the project along with graduate students Yuanjie Pang and Fatima Eftekhari, said the technology is interesting because it has “a lot of possible applications.”

“We’re not biologists, but one experiment I could envision would be to trap a virus and put a cell near it to understand exactly how an infection occurs,” Gordon said.

Though optical trapping has been around since 1986, previous methods used too much energy and often caused the overheating and death of the viruses being studied. Gordon said that the smaller the object being studied, the more intense a beam of light has to be.

At the nanometer scale, Gordon explained, if a particle is made twice as small, the beam of light holding it has to be 16 times more powerful.

Gordon found this to be especially problematic when trying to trap biological particles.

Gordon and his team were able to improve this technique by poking a small hole in a metal film only a few times larger than the actual particle. When the particle nears the light going through the hole, the flow of light is greatly altered and it effectively traps the tiny object while using about 100-times less energy.

Researchers hope that the lower energy levels needed for this technique will not kill viruses. While the team has successfully trapped objects as small as viruses (which tend to range from 10 to 300 nanometers), they hope to trap an actual virus within the next year.

Meanwhile, the group is currently looking at ways to improve the technology to more precisely manipulate viruses.

“The ultimate goal is to trap a virus or something of a similar compact size,” said Pang, adding that trapping a virus will be harder than trapping a simple particle. “It will be interesting to see because this can have a lot of applications in the real world.”

While the theory work and nano-fabrication was done mostly at UVic by Pang and Eftekhari, most of the experimentation was done by Gordon and the team at the ICFO in Spain. Their findings were published last month in the journal “Nature Physics.”

“If you ever want to go into a field with a million questions [asking] ‘why?,’ this is it,” said Gordon. “We’re always looking for good UVic students — some of the best students I’ve had have been from UVic.”