Fundamentals Of Microbiology 10th Edition by Jeffrey Pommerville

Exercise 42

As a young genetic engineer with a biotech company, you have been given a virotherapy project. The hepatitis B virus is a dsDNA virus that during its replicative cycle often produces different forms of virus particles. The ones that are filamentous or spherical completely lack a viral genome and are thus defective; they are just assembled capsids but with the same spikes as the infective virions. The biotech company wants you to come up with a plan to use these defective particles for biotechnology applications. What might you include on your list of applications