Electron beam irradiation on novel coronavirus (COVID-19): A Monte–Carlo simulation*

Abstract

The novel coronavirus pneumonia triggered by COVID-19 is now raging the whole world. As a rapid and reliable killing COVID-19 method in industry, electron beam irradiation can interact with virus molecules and destroy their activity. With the unexpected appearance and quickly spreading of the virus, it is urgently necessary to figure out the mechanism of electron beam irradiation on COVID-19. In this study, we establish a virus structure and molecule model based on the detected gene sequence of Wuhan patient, and calculate irradiated electron interaction with virus atoms via a Monte Carlo simulation that track each elastic and inelastic collision of all electrons. The characteristics of irradiation damage on COVID-19, atoms’ ionizations and electron energy losses are calculated and analyzed with regions. We simulate the different situations of incident electron energy for evaluating the influence of incident energy on virus damage. It is found that under the major protecting of an envelope protein layer, the inner RNA suffers the minimal damage. The damage for a ∼100-nm-diameter virus molecule is not always enhanced by irradiation energy monotonicity, for COVID-19, the irradiation electron energy of the strongest energy loss damage is 2 keV.

A Journey From SARS-CoV-2 to COVID-19 and Beyond: A Comprehensive Insight of Epidemiology, Diagnosis, Pathogenesis, and Overview of the Progress into Its Therapeutic Management

“…This is the same mechanism as that observed previously for the SARS-CoV virus (Imai et al, 2010;Hoffmann et al, 2020;Wan et al, 2020). Some studies have found that the ACE2 receptor affinity of SARS-CoV-2 is more efficient than that of SARS-CoV(2003) but less efficient than its 2002 strain (Guobao et al, 2007;) (see Figure 3). It is believed that any mutation on the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of S protein could make the virus more pathogenic.…”

Calculations of energy deposition and ionization in the 2019 novel coronavirus by electron beam irradiation

“…To avoid exposure to COVID-19, effective methods that kill or inactivate the virus on contaminated media or in specific environments are demanded. Electron beam irradiation is widely used for killing microorganisms, bacteria, and viruses ( Berovic et al, 2002 ; Benson, 2002 ; Feng et al, 2020 ), because its penetration depth and dose can be controlled to comply with environmental protection requirements. Moreover, under controlled irradiation, the virus can be partially or totally inactivated, providing useful information on its properties ( Lidzey et al, 1995 ; Smolko and Lombardo, 2005 ).…”

Monte Carlo Simulation Method Highlighting on the Electron Beam Irradiation on the Structure of SARS-CoV-2

“…As the new coronavirus (COVID-19) has many types of proteins of surrounding function [ 7 ], for the feasibility of the calculation, we choose here three types of proteins mainly during the construction of the physical model with a reasonable simplification. Like other coronaviruses discovered [ 8 ], such as SARS, MERS, the new coronavirus (COVID-19) is first surrounded by a few scattered spike glycoproteins, as shown in Fig. 1 [ 6 ], and then under the spike glycoproteins there is more than one layer of envelope proteins Table 1 .…”