Influenza is one of the most contagious and rapidly spreading infectious diseases and an important global cause of hospital admissions and mortality. There are some amounts of the virus in the air constantly. These amounts is generally not enough to cause disease in people, due to infection prevention by healthy immune systems. However, at a higher concentration of the airborne virus, the risk of human infection increases dramatically. Early detection of the threshold virus concentration is essential for prevention of the spread of influenza infection. This review discusses different approaches for measuring the amount of influenza A virus particles in the air and assessing their infectiousness. Here we also discuss the data describing the relationship between the influenza virus subtypes and virus air transmission, and distribution of viral particles in aerosol drops of different sizes.

We developed a method for the fast transformation of virions of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) in so-called spherical particles (SPs) of different sizes. These SPs turned out to be highly useful for the preparation of different kinds of important biotechnological products. In this communication, we report that a representative of the flexuous helical virus group-potato virus X (PVX), produces SPs as well, but these SPs differ from TMV SPs in several important aspects. PVX SPs may be useful biotechnological devices.

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Potato virus X (PVX) and some other potexviruses can be reconstitutedin vitrofrom viral coat protein (CP) and RNA. PVX CP is capable of forming viral ribonucleoprotein complexes (vRNP) not only with homologous, but also with foreign RNAs. This paper presents the structure and properties of vRNP assembledin vitroupon incubation of PVX CP and RNAs of various plant and animal viruses belonging to different taxonomic groups. We have shown that the morphology and translational properties of vRNPs containing foreign (heterologous) RNA are identical to those of homological vRNP (PVX RNA – PVX CP). Our data suggest that the assembly of the “mixed” vRNPin vitrocould be started at the 5’-proximal region of the RNA, producing a helical structure of vRNPs with foreign nucleic acids. The formation of heterologous vRNPin vitrowith PVX CP appears not to require a specific 5’ end RNA nucleotide sequence, and the PVX CP seems to be able to pack foreign genetic material of various sizes and compositions into artificial virus-like particles.