AAV virions are small, what about larger virions particles?
Can mass photometry be used to count larger virions (or extracellular vesicular bodies) and measure their mass too? For example, I'm wondering if herpesviruses or exosomes could be measured using these instruments. What type of calibrant would be used?
What is the upper and lower limit of mass detection?
Very interesting concept though...
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Hi Akash,
The current mass photometry instrumentation operates in the range of 30 kDa to 6 MDa and has an upper size limit of approximately 40 nm. That covers everything from individual proteins, nucleic acid fragments, protein complexes and up to very big assemblies such as AAVs – roughly 4.6 MDa and 22-25 nm. Particles with a larger mass, such as bigger viruses, will fall outside of the linear range of the current instrumentation and scatter light in a different regime – no longer Rayleigh scattering.
Hope this helps!