During the first COVID-19 wave, when Saumitra Das, a professor at the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology (MCB), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), and colleagues were sequencing thousands of samples every day to check for SARS-CoV-2 variants as part of INSACOG, the Government of India’s genome surveillance initiative, they were racing against time to track mutations as they appeared. The needed an assay system if they wanted to predict whether one of these mutations was going to be dangerous from a public health perspective.
The assay protocol widely followed, said an IISc release, involved isolating the virus from the samples, creating multiple copies of the virus, and studying its transmissibility and efficiency at entering living cells. Working with such a highly infectious virus is dangerous and requires a Bio Safety Level-3 (BSL-3) lab, but there are only a handful of these labs across the country equipped to handle such viruses.
To address this problem, Prof. Das and his team, along with collaborators at IISc, have developed and tested a novel virus-like particle (VLP) – a non-infectious nanoscale molecule that resembles and behaves like the virus but does not contain its native genetic material – in a study published in Microbiology Spectrum.
