<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Nov 25, 2020, at 04:19, Nick Moffitt <<a href="mailto:nick@zork.net" class="">nick@zork.net</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><meta charset="UTF-8" class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: LucidaGrande; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">Enzymes are definitely slowed by cold, but can only really be stopped by absolute-zero temperatures. Still, the shelf life of a cryogenic vaccine sample only needs to be measured in days, so this is acceptable.</span><br style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: LucidaGrande; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;" class=""></div></blockquote><br class=""></div><div>One of the things I learned this year: viruses with an outer coating, e.g., coronaviruses, are less hardy when it comes to typical cleaning processes than those without, e.g., ebola. I initially found this counterintuitive.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>The reason is that the outer-coat viruses rely on their surface structure to infect, and that is readily taken apart by soap, because the coat, just like cells, is a bilipid layer that soap is designed to tear apart.</div><br class=""><div class="">Where the much stronger molecular chains in uncoated viruses like ebola are far, far harder to tear apart, so harder to destroy its infectivity.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="">(When it comes to things like ultraviolet degradation, though, the coated viruses win.)</span></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Deirdre</div></body></html>