Porous Gold Nanoparticles for Nonresistant Inactivation of Influenza A Virus

This article focuses on the inactivation of Influenza A viruses using porous gold nanoparticles (PoGNPs). Influenza virus have become resistant to the antiviral drugs such as Oseltamivir or Amantadine, because of their... [ view full abstract ]

This article focuses on the inactivation of Influenza A viruses using porous gold nanoparticles (PoGNPs). Influenza virus have become resistant to the antiviral drugs such as Oseltamivir or Amantadine, because of their frequent genetic mutation. To prevent the antiviral treatment from building up the resistance, we first set the antiviral target which remains steady regardless of their subtype, disulfide bonds. As the disulfide bonds in hemagglutinin (HA) show regular pattern in entire HA protein sequence (1), we assumed that cleaving the disulfide bonds on HA could be an ideal target for influenza virus attenuation.
PoGNPs, which has a large surface area due to its unique structure, had fabricated by surfactant-free emulsion method (2). The PoGNPs expected to show high affinity to the disulfide bonds because of the gold-thiol interaction. We demonstrated the decrease of the viral infectivity that was exposed to PoGNPs by the MDCK cell viability test with various subtypes of viruses (H1N1, H3N2, H9N2) whereas non-porous 130 nm gold nanoparticles and 130 nm silver nanoparticles showed much less effect on inactivation of viruses. The intracellular viral RNA quantification by realtime RT-PCR also demonstrated to ensure the mechanism of viral inhibition that the PoGNPs had blocked the viral entry process by deforming the HA, which resulted in membrane fusion.
This PoGNP-utilized inactivation process proposes more convenient way for getting inactivated virus under laboratory-sized experiment. Moreover, PoGNPs can further be used in many ways such as photothermal lysis of virus or surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy. Their versatility suggests the novel method for viral RNA extraction and detection.

(1) M. S. Segal, J. M. Bye, J. F. Sambrook, M.-J. H. Gething. 1992. J. Cell Biol. 118: 227-244
(2) D. Bang, T. Lee, J. Choi, Y. Park, E. Kim, Y. Huh, S. Haam. 2015. Adv. Healthc. Mater. 4: 255-263