Plaque forming unit
Encyclopedia
A plaque-forming unit is a measure of the number of particles capable of forming plaques
Viral plaque
A viral plaque is a visible structure formed within a cell culture, such as bacterial cultures within some nutrient medium . The bacteriophage viruses replicate and spread, thus generating regions of cell destructions known as plaques....

 per unit volume, such as virus
Virus
A virus is a small infectious agent that can replicate only inside the living cells of organisms. Viruses infect all types of organisms, from animals and plants to bacteria and archaea...

 particles. It is a functional measurement rather than a measurement of the absolute quantity of particles: viral particles that are defective or which fail to infect their target cell will not produce a plaque and thus will not be counted. For example, a solution of tick-borne encephalitis virus
Tick-borne meningoencephalitis
Tick-borne encephalitis is a viral infectious disease involving the central nervous system. The disease most often manifests as meningitis, encephalitis, or meningoencephalitis. Although TBE is most commonly recognized as a neurological disorder, mild fever can also occur...

 with a concentration of 1,000 PFU/µl
Litér
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 indicates that 1 µl
Litér
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of the solution contains enough virus particles to produce 1000 infectious plaques in a cell monolayer, but no inference can be made about the relationship of pfu to number of virus particles.

External links

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