Tracking single viruses infecting their host cells using quantum dots

Abstract

Single-virus tracking (SVT) technique, which uses microscopy to monitor the behaviors of viruses, is a vital tool to study the real-time and in situ infection dynamics and virus-related interactions in live cells. To make SVT a more versatile tool in biological research, the researchers have developed a quantum dot (QD)-based SVT technique, which can be utilized for long-term and highly sensitive tracking in live cells. In this review, we describe the development of a QD-based SVT technique and its biological applications. We first discuss the advantage of QDs as tags in the SVT field by comparing the conventional tags, and then focus on the implementation of QD-based SVT experiments, including the QD labeling strategy, instrumentation, and image analysis method. Next, we elaborate the recent advances of QD-based SVT in the biological field, and mainly emphasize the representative examples to show how to use this technique to acquire more meaningful biological information.