Construction of Fosmid-based SARS-CoV-2 replicons for antiviral drug screening and replication analyses in biosafety level 2 facilities.

ABSTRACT: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), has necessitated the global development of countermeasures since its outbreak. However, current therapeutics and vaccines to stop the pandemic are insufficient and this is mainly because of the emergence of resistant variants, which requires the urgent development of new countermeasures, such as antiviral drugs. Replicons, self-replicating RNAs that do not produce virions, are a promising system for this purpose because they safely recreate viral replication, enabling antiviral screening in biosafety level (BSL)-2 facilities. We herein constructed three pCC2Fos-based RNA replicons lacking some open reading frames (ORF) of SARS-CoV-2: the Δorf2-8, Δorf2.4, and Δorf2 repl

SUBMITTER: Takazawa S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10374963 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature