Generation of a Sleeping Beauty transposon-based cellular system for rapid and sensitive identification of SARS-CoV-2 host dependency and restriction factors

Autor: Fabian Roesmann, Marek Widera, Jennifer Reis, Silvia Bracharz, Vanessa Luciano, Anna Lena Siemund, Christiane Pallas, Eric Kowarz, Rolf Marschalek, Johanna M. Raffel, Alexander Wilhelm, Marius Kuelp, Sandra Ciesek, Tuna Toptan
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Popis: SummaryThe severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the causative agent of the acute respiratory disease COVID-19, which has become a global concern due to its rapid spread. The common methods to monitor and quantitate SARS-CoV-2 infectivity in cell culture are so far time-consuming and labor-intensive. Using the Sleeping Beauty transposase system, we generated a robust and versatile reporter cell system that allows SARS-CoV-2 infection experiments compatible for high-throughput and live cell imaging. The reporter cell is based on lung derived A549 cells, which show a profound interferon response and convenient cell culture characteristics. ACE2 and TMPRSS2 were introduced for constitutive expression in A549 cells. Subclones with varying levels of ACE2/TMPRSS2 were screened for optimal SARS-CoV2 susceptibility. Furthermore, extensive evaluation demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2 infected reporter cells were distinguishable from mock-infected cells and already showed approximately 12 h post infection a clear signal to noise ratio in terms of cell roughness, fluorescence and a profound visible cytopathic effect. Moreover, due to the high transfection efficiency and proliferation capacity, Sleeping Beauty transposase-based overexpression cell lines with a second inducible fluorescence reporter cassette (eGFP) can be generated in a very short time, enabling the investigation of host and restriction factors in a doxycycline-inducible manner. Thus, the novel reporter cell line allows rapid and sensitive detection of SARS-CoV-2 infection and the screening for host factors essential for viral replication.Highlights- Sleeping Beauty transposon-based cellular system was used to generate a highly susceptible cell line for monitoring SARS-CoV-2 infection- The versatile reporter cell line A549-AT is suitable for rapid and sensitive high-throughput assays- Additional gene specific expression cassettes allow the identification of SARS-CoV-2 host dependency and restriction factors
Databáze: OpenAIRE