Contemporary seasonal human coronaviruses display differences in cellular tropism compared to laboratory-adapted reference strains.

ABSTRACT: Seasonal human coronaviruses (sHCoVs) cause 15%-30% of common colds. The reference strains used for research were isolated decades ago and have been passaged extensively, but contemporary sHCoVs have been challenging to study as they are notoriously difficult to grow in standard immortalized cell lines. Here, we addressed these issues by utilizing primary human nasal epithelial cells (HNECs) and immortalized human bronchial epithelial cells (BCi) differentiated at an air-liquid interface, as well as human embryonic stem cell-derived alveolar type II (AT2) cells to recover contemporary sHCoVs from human nasopharyngeal specimens. From 21 specimens, we recovered four HCoV-229e, three HCoV-NL63, and eight HCoV-OC43 viruses. All contemporary sHCoVs showed sequence differences from lab-adapted C

SUBMITTER: Gartner MJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12456146 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature