Abstract
ON the basis of inactivation data for nearly two dozen plant, animal and bacterial viruses, Lea1 pointed out that the radiosensitive or target diameter was within a factor of 2 of the physical diameter of nearly all the viruses studied, the agreement becoming poorer with increase in diameter. From this agreement Lea concluded that the small viruses must be composed almost exclusively of radiosensitive material which he identified with nucleoprotein. The very large viruses were stated to be more like ordinary cells in that they seemed to have an appreciable amount of relatively insensitive ‘cytoplasmic’ material. Other workers (for example, refs. 2 and 3) have given experimental reasons for believing that the nucleoprotein material is the radiosensitive portion of a cell.
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References
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EPSTEIN, H. Identification of Radiosensitive Volume with Nucleic Acid Volume. Nature 171, 394–395 (1953). https://doi.org/10.1038/171394a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/171394a0
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