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Updated: Feb 5, 2026

Transmitting Plant Viruses Using Whiteflies
Published on: November 8, 2013
Application of Plant Viruses as a Biotemplate for Nanomaterial Fabrication
Yu Zhang1,2, Yixin Dong3, Jinhua Zhou4
1College of Chemical Engineering, Jiangsu Provincial Key Lab for the Chemistry and Utilization of Agro-Forest Biomass, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing 210037, China. yuzhang@njfu.edu.cn.
Abstract:
Viruses are widely used to fabricate nanomaterials in the field of nanotechnology. Plant viruses are of great interest to the nanotechnology field because of their symmetry, polyvalency, homogeneous size distribution, and ability to self-assemble. This homogeneity can be used to obtain the high uniformity of the templated material and its related properties. In this paper, the variety of nanomaterials generated in rod-like and spherical plant viruses is highlighted for the cowpea chlorotic mottle virus (CCMV), cowpea mosaic virus (CPMV), brome mosaic virus (BMV), and tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). Their recent studies on developing nanomaterials in a wide range of applications from biomedicine and catalysts to biosensors are reviewed.
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