Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 28, 2026
High-throughput Confocal Imaging of Quantum Dot-Conjugated SARS-CoV-2 Spike Trimers to Track Binding and Endocytosis in HEK293T Cells
Published on: April 21, 2022
Tracking single viruses infecting their host cells using quantum dots
Shu-Lin Liu1, Zhi-Gang Wang1, Zhi-Ling Zhang1
1Key Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry for Biology and Medicine (Ministry of Education), College of Chemistry and Molecular Sciences, State Key Laboratory of Virology, The Institute for Advanced Studies, and Wuhan Institute of Biotechnology, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, P. R. China. dwpang@whu.edu.cn.
Abstract:
Single-virus tracking (SVT) technique, which uses microscopy to monitor the behaviors of viruses, is a vital tool to study the real-time and in situ infection dynamics and virus-related interactions in live cells. To make SVT a more versatile tool in biological research, the researchers have developed a quantum dot (QD)-based SVT technique, which can be utilized for long-term and highly sensitive tracking in live cells. In this review, we describe the development of a QD-based SVT technique and its biological applications. We first discuss the advantage of QDs as tags in the SVT field by comparing the conventional tags, and then focus on the implementation of QD-based SVT experiments, including the QD labeling strategy, instrumentation, and image analysis method. Next, we elaborate the recent advances of QD-based SVT in the biological field, and mainly emphasize the representative examples to show how to use this technique to acquire more meaningful biological information.
