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  • Washing your hands with soap is possibly the simplest 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 likes to interact with water, while the lipid tail

  • is hydrophobic, which means it wants to get away from water to find similar, water-avoiding particles.

  • This is the basis of how soap works.

  • When the molecules encounter lipid particles on our skin, the tails aggregate around them

  • to form spherical structures called micelles, creating water-free environment.

  • Similar thing happens when they encounter enveloped viruses such as coronavirus.

  • Enveloped viruses carry their genome and supporting proteins inside a lipid bilayer membrane

  • with the proteins necessary for infection embedded in 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 attracted to the lipids in the membrane.

  • They take advantage of the presence of membrane proteins, which can perturb the neatly organized

  • bilayer to insert themselves into the viral membrane.

  • If there is only a small amount of soap, the soap molecules only loosen the membrane,

  • but with more soap, they begin to create micelles around membrane lipids.

  • They are also attracted to hydrophobic amino acids in the membrane proteins,

  • extracting them from the membrane.

  • The structural integrity of a virus is essential for infection.

  • So, washing your hands with soap protects you better from infection than washing with only water,

  • and the longer you lather, the higher your chance of destroying the virus.

Washing your hands with soap is possibly the simplest way to flush pathogens down the drain.

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