Virus tricked into glowing reveals entryway to cellular victim

The virus may be prevented from entering a cell because the bolt cutter that it normally uses is blocked by the big glowing molecule you attached to it. But this seems like one of these heroic experiments that only works when the wind is blowing from the right quarter.The researchers replaced the glowing molecule with a quantum dot. Even better, the color of the glow is tuned by changing the size of the blob, so we can make nearly any color of quantum dot we want.To get the quantum dot inside a virus, the researchers made use of the procedure by which a virus replicates. After which, the DNA, along with the quantum dot, got packaged up in the virus and ejected from the cell.Of course, not every virus particle contains a quantum dot, because the incorporation process is governed by the random chance of what bumps into what else inside the nucleus.