Paradigm shift from conventional processes to advanced membrane adsorption-mediated inactivation processes towards holistic management of virus - A critical review

Since the earliest days, occurrence of deadly outbreaks caused by prevalence of different pathogenic virus infections affected human community periodically and caused millions of deaths per year. In order to improve safety and quality of human life against virus infections, it is imperative to do rigorous evaluation of existing virus treatment or elimination processes that would help to understand their potential merits, limitations and further prompts identifying the scope for developing advanced future technologies towards viral elimination. Considering the objective, present review comprehensively analyze present scope, potential and limitations of individual physical, chemical and biological methods in the direction of holistic management (recovery, purification, detection, elimination and disinfection) of viruses from liquid, solid, gaseous and interfacial environments. Among various treatment approaches, membrane filtration technology has been recognized as most promising, cost effective and energy efficient tool to deal with virus elimination from various resources. Membrane-based methods facilitates wide ranges of virus removal and disinfection capacity, mediated by size-exclusion, electrostatic or hydrophobic interactions and entrapment mechanisms. Based on the present demand of developing a complete and fully mature virus disinfection technique, potential of electro-spun nanofibrous membranes in selective capture and inactivation of viruses are clearly evaluated in the present review. Furthermore, it was found out from comprehensive analysis of available membrane mediated virus elimination processes that membranes derived from different forms of abundantly available, renewable and natural polymers such as cellulose are quite effective to capture, separate and inactivate viruses through depth filtration, charge based filtration and adsorption-oriented techniques.