University of Delaware Professor Juan Perilla is featured in the New York Times: If You Squeeze the Coronavirus, Does It Shatter?

Excerpt from the New York Times Article:

Of all the pandemic questions bedeviling scientists, the one that Juan Perilla is asking might be among the strangest: If a shrunk-down hand were to squeeze the coronavirus, would it squish, or would it shatter?

Viruses like H.I.V. tend to be on the softer side, smooshing down like a foam ball, whereas the ones that cause influenza are more brittle, prone to cracking like an egg, said Dr. Perilla, a biophysical chemist at the University of Delaware in Newark. Coronaviruses, he suspects, are somewhere in the middle, a sort of tactile Goldilocks in the world of infectious disease.

“It’s something you never consider when you talk about viruses,” Dr. Perilla said. But it’s part and parcel, he added, of “trying to understand how a virion is strung together.”

Like many other microbes, viruses are known best as malady-toting motes of misfortune — obvious grist for biologists keen to understand the inner workings of infection. But in recent years, physicists too have joined the field, eager to decipher how viruses cobble themselves together and move from place to place despite lacking most of the machinery that enables cells to replicate and run.

Read the full article from the New York Times here.