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About viruses and viral disease

Viral size matters

1 June 2010

One property of viruses that is difficult to conceptualize is their small size. I can tell you that viruses can be anywhere from 20 to 750 nanometers in diameter, but that’s not easy to visualize, even for those of us who routinely work with small measurements. One way to demonstrate how small viruses are is to compare them with animal and plant cells, bacteria, proteins, molecules, and atoms, as shown below:

But even comparisons of this type fall short because they do not provide a readily grasped real-life reference. A better way was suggested by my colleague Karla Kirkegaard: Start by multiplying the size of viruses and humans one million times. A supine human would then extend from California to Colorado. At this scale, a cell would be about the size of a lecture hall. Depending on their size, viruses would either be lemons (poliovirus, 30 nanometers), grapefruits (retroviruses, 100 nanometers), or watermelons (poxvirus, 250 nanometers).

Peter Palese has a different way of relating the small size of viruses. If you magnify a virus so it is the size of a human fist, then a cell would be about half the size of the Empire State Building.

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Comments

  1. Robin says

    24 June 2010 at 3:47 am

    That's so interesting. I knew they were tiny but had no idea. Bacteria must be huge next to a virus.

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  4. Evan says

    21 July 2011 at 8:08 pm

    That’s pretty cool. I had no idea that viruses where that small. 

  5. Fletchergj says

    19 September 2011 at 2:48 am

    What could be interesting is to establish functional relevance to viral sizes. Viruses are small but often  functionally challenging. We had published a paper on viral size and its relevance on Med Hypotheses.

  6. Debora (Rio de Janeiro) says

    12 March 2012 at 2:32 pm

    Could I say the viruses are to an avarage human body, as we ‘humans’ are to the earth?

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