Inactivation of newcastle disease virus by cold plasma

Infection mediated by virus is becoming a major contributor to high mortality in stockbreeding, which will lead to serious economic loss. And virus is a small infectious agent that can infect all types of life forms. It replicates by using vital metabolic pathways within host cells. So they are difficult to eliminate without using drugs that cause toxic effects to host cells. At present, the main sterilization method in stockbreeding is chemical disinfection. However, disinfection failures and residues of veterinary drug are so often that a more effective method is in the need for the prevention and cure of disease caused by virus such as Newcastle disease virus (NDV). With the wide research on cold plasma, its advantage over traditional method in many biomedical fields such as tooth whitening, wound healing, bacteria inactivation has been confirmed. But few studies focused on the effect of cold plasma on virus, which will bring us generous benefits, as plasma is low-temperature, less-toxic and more effective. In this study, cold plasma generated under different parameters was employed to treat NDV solution that was obtained from allantoic fluid. After that, virus solution was administrated to 10-day specific pathogen free (SPF) chicken embryos. A life-or-death situation of embryos was tested every 24 hours for duration of 96 hours. Then Neutralization test and hemagglutination assay were used to further evaluate the inactivation effect of plasma on NDV. And scanning emission microscope (SEM) was used to observe the morphology change by cold plasma. The life-or-dead situation result, Neutralization test and hemagglutination assay showed that after a 10min-treatment by plasma, NDV was inactivated completely. Besides, shrinking of virus shell was observed by SEM. All these results demonstrated that cold plasma can be an effective means for disinfection of NDV and may do a great job in the prevention and cure of infectious disease caused by virus in stockbreeding. Bes- des, the results also indicated the potential application of plasma in treatment of bioaerosol and preparation of viral vaccine.