Femtosecond (fs) laser irradiation techniques are emerging tools for inactivating viruses that do not involve ionizing radiation. In this work, the inactivation of two bacteriophages representing protective capsids with different geometric constraints, that is, the near‐spherical MS2 (with a diameter of 27 nm) and the filamentous M13 (with a length of 880 nm) is compared using energetic visible and near‐infrared fs laser pulses with various energies, pulse durations, and exposure times. Intriguingly, the results show that inactivation using 400 nm lasers is substantially more efficient for MS2 compared to M13. In contrast, using 800 nm lasers, M13 was slightly more efficiently inactivated. For both viruses, the genome was exposed to a harmful environment upon fs‐laser irradiation. However, in addition to the protection of the genome, the metastable capsids differ in many properties required for stepwise cell entry that may explain their dissimilar behavior after (partial) disassembly. For MS2, the dominant mechanism of fs‐laser inactivation was the aggregation of the viral capsid proteins, whereas aggregation did not affect M13 inactivation, suggesting that the dominant mechanism of M13 inactivation was related to breaking of secondary protein links.

中文翻译：

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高能飞秒激光灭活MS2和M13噬菌体的比较研究。

飞秒（fs）激光辐射技术是用于灭活不涉及电离辐射的病毒的新兴工具。在这项工作中，使用高能可见光比较了两种具有不同几何限制的代表保护性衣壳的噬菌体的失活，即接近球形的MS2（直径为27 nm）和丝状M13（长度为880 nm）。以及具有各种能量，脉冲持续时间和曝光时间的近红外fs激光脉冲。有趣的是，结果表明，与M13相比，使用400 nm激光器灭活的MS2效率更高。相反，使用800 nm激光，M13的失活效率更高。对于这两种病毒，fs激光辐照都会使基因组暴露于有害环境中。但是，除了保护基因组外，亚稳态衣壳在逐步进入细胞所需的许多特性方面有所不同，这可以解释（部分）拆卸后它们的不同行为。对于MS2，fs激光失活的主要机制是病毒衣壳蛋白的聚集，而聚集并不影响M13失活，这表明M13失活的主要机制与二级蛋白链的断裂有关。