Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2009
An account is given of ultrafiltration studies with Nicotiana virus 11 (tobacco necrosis virus). It is shown that though the filtration end-point is about 40 mμ, there is invariably a sharp drop in the local lesion counts between the membrane pore sizes 250 and 125 mμ. This phenomenon shows itself as a “bench” or shelf with an upward trend in the filtration curve (see Text-fig. 1, curve A). A number of possible explanations are given. The fact that increasing dilution raises the height of the bench leads to the deduction that large particles are breaking up into smaller ones, the larger particles being aggregates of the smaller. Experiments on resuspension of virus inside the filter and fractional filtration support the same conclusion.
From the filtration end-point the particle size of the virus is computed to be between 13 and 20 mμ.