Coronavirus Research and Neutralization Assays

Cellecta offers a range of products and services to support research on coronavirus. The public health crisis resulting from the current COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the critical need to improve understanding of pathogenic viruses, in particular, coronaviruses. Three deadly outbreaks since the early 2000s were due to different species of this viral group, with the latest SAR2-CoV2 virus resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide.

Lentiviral particles which are routinely used in biosafety level-2 (BSL-2) laboratories, can be pseudotyped with coronavirus spike proteins (S-protein) that mediate binding and infection to target cells. The spike protein on the viral surface binds to the cellular receptor allowing the virus to enter the cell.

The use of actual coronavirus for testing infection requires BSL-3 or higher laboratory procedures, which limits the ability to do this research. However, lentiviral particles can be manipulated in typical BSL-2 laboratories. Pseudotyping the lentiviral particles with the coronavirus coat protein, such as spike protein, enables researchers to study binding using routine laboratory procedures. As a result, it is possible to conveniently investigate how compounds, factors, and other parameters might inhibit or otherwise affect coronavirus-cell interactions, enabling a larger number of investigators to carry out studies that help better understand the biology of these viruses.

• Description
• How It Works
• Applications
• FAQ

• Coronaviruses enter cells using the spike glycoprotein (or S-protein) present on the surface of the virus. Antibodies that neutralize infection of the virus often inhibit or otherwise block binding of the spike protein with its receptor on the target cells (e.g., the Ace2 protein). As a result, there is significant interest in studying this interaction using assays to measure how antibodies and other compounds or factors affect viral binding and entry.

  Since SARS and MERS coronaviruses are pathogenic, research on them requires biosafety level-3 procedures which can be difficult to carry out in most commercial and university laboratories. An alternative approach is to pseudotype lentiviral particles with the coronavirus coat proteins. This enables researchers to carry out studies on these viral elements in BSL-2 environments. Cellecta offers a range of products to enable laboratories to carry out studies using these spike-protein pseudotyped lentiviral particles.

  • Spike-protein-pseudotyped lentiviral particles with fluorescent protein or luciferase reporters for a number of variants including alpha, beta, gamma, delta and omicron.
  • Cell lines engineered to express receptor proteins (Ace2 or Dpp4).
  • Packaged lentivirus expressing receptor proteins.
  • Pseudotyped Lentiviral Packaging Mixes

  

• Making spike-protein pseudotyped lentivirus follows the same basic protocol as making the standard VSV-G pseudotyped lentiviral particle.

  1. Lentiviral reporter vector
  2. Plasmid expressing the Spike protein
  3. Packaging plasmids (Gag, Pol, Rev)

  The cells are incubated and viral particles harvested for use in receptor-expressing cells.

  

• Lentiviral pseudotyping provides a scalable BSL-2-compatible method to study virus-host interactions and enables:

  • Screening compounds, antibodies, or other factors
  • Testing spike protein variants
  • Characterizing binding of novel viruses

  

• FAQs

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