What at first glance looks like a pretty felt flower is actually much more complex and groundbreaking: they are bacteriophages that have come together on their own to form this three-dimensional flower-like shape.
Bacteriophages are viruses that attack bacteria. This means they can serve as a treatment for many forms of infections. In the above structure, they are 100 times more efficient at finding bacterial targets than in their unconnected state. That’s why experts have been trying to artificially construct such a structure for decades.
Nobody could have expected that nature would simply produce the desired structure itself. The delicate viral flower was discovered by a research team led by Lei Tian from McMaster University in Canada – purely by chance. Unsuspectingly, the researchers used a different preparation method than usual and treated the bacteriophages with high-pressure carbon dioxide instead of the usual high temperatures and solvents. When Tian and his colleagues then looked at the images of the phages, they were amazed: the phages had assembled themselves into the long-sought shape.
The researchers also demonstrated that the phages in this structure actually detect diffuse targets better: the structures detected even low concentrations of Legionella in the water of commercial cooling towers much more efficiently than unconnected phages.
The flower-like phage structures not only look beautiful, they can also be of great use in medicine and their structure improves the targeted detection and killing of bacteria.