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Carnegie Mellon University Associate Professor Alex Evilevitch said his team's accomplishment could lead to fully understanding viral infections, resulting in new drugs to interfere with the process.

"We are studying the physics of viruses, not the biology of viruses", said Evilevitch. "By treating viruses as physical objects, we can identify physical properties and mechanisms of infection that are common to a variety of viruses, regardless of their biological makeup, which could lead to the development of broad spectrum antiviral drugs."

Evilevitch said his current findings also have the potential to improve the development of gene therapy, which uses viruses to deliver functional genes directly to human cells to replace defective genes that are causing disease.

Evilevitch and his colleagues from Lund University in Sweden and the University of Lyon in France said they used an experimental technique to directly measure the heat, and thus the thermal energy, released during viral genome ejection. Until now, only indirect measurements of this energy have been available.

They describe their new method in the Feb. 5 issue of the Journal of Molecular Biology.

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