A Chinese research team from the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences has uncovered a new pattern in virus transmission through synthetic biology techniques.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on the movement patterns of E. coli bacteria and a bacteriophage, M13, that can infect it.

To understand the underlying patterns, researchers used E. coli as the host and M13 bacteriophage as the virus, constructing a system in the lab where the host and virus interact.