Volker Thiel, PhD, University of Bern and the Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office, Switzerland, "It's been a long way — 20 years of coronavirus reverse genetics"
A novel reverse genetics system for coronaviruses was presented by Dr. Thiel. Even though the family of viruses has been known since the 1960s, only in 2000 was the first reverse genetics results achieved. Since the virus holds a comparably large RNA, the standard methods for replication are time consuming, need infectious carriers and were unstable in E.Coli as a host. A new method, using yeast as the cloning host was therefore developed. The full RNA is split into 2-3 kb fragments and undergoes in-yeast assembly. This method turns out to be highly effective with almost no replication errors and represents a much faster method than that with unstable E.Coli hosts.
