Corona in India - Fighting Coronavirus with Soap in unlock 1.0 || Corona Cases

 Washing your hands with soap is possibly thesimplest way to flush pathogens down the drain. Soap molecules can interact with pathogens,such as coronavirus leading to their destruction. Each molecule has 2 parts. The head is hydrophilic, which means it likesto interact with water, while the lipid tail is hydrophobic, which means it wants to getaway from water to find similar, water-avoiding particles. This is the basis of how soap works. When the molecules encounter lipid particleson our skin, the tails aggregate around them to form spherical structures called micelles, creating water-free environment. Similar thing happens when they encounterenveloped viruses such as coronavirus. Enveloped viruses carry their genome and supportingproteins inside a lipid bilayer membrane with the proteins necessary for infection embeddedin the membrane. In cells and viruses these lipids are packed neatly into 2 sheets with the lipid tails facing inward. The lipid ends of the soap molecules are attractedto the lipids in the membrane. They take advantage of the presence of membraneproteins, which can perturb the neatly organized bilayer to insert themselves into the viralmembrane. If there is only a small amount of soap, thesoap molecules only loosen the membrane, but with more soap, they begin to create micelles around membrane lipids. They are also attracted to hydrophobic aminoacids in the membrane proteins, extracting them from the membrane. The structural integrity of a virus is essentialfor infection. So, washing your hands with soap protectsyou better from infection than washing with only water, and the longer you lather, thehigher your chance of destroying the virus.