In common with most other people, I first became aware of the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 (the causative agent of CoVID-19), through news reports from Wuhan in Hubei province, China in January 2020. At the time, it looked like this might be a re-run of the SARS epidemic from 2003, which was limited to China and neighbouring countries.

However, as the disease seemed to be spreading more quickly than SARS, I was asked to participate in a number of radio and TV interviews, wearing my virologist hat, starting on the 10th Feb. These early broadcasts mainly concerned a description of the virus and its symptoms and discussions of the containment measures being enforced in Wuhan and surrounding districts without much concern about the UK’s potential situation. This changed dramatically in early March when it became obvious that the disease had established itself in Italy and was rapidly moving throughout Europe.

The interviews became far more frequent and sombre in tone and started including questions about testing, social distancing, possible vaccines etc. I hope I was able to contribute useful information – it has certainly been a very interesting experience for me! I’m pleased to see that such concepts as PCR, antibody testing and R number are now in common parlance. A particular point I was able to stress was how quickly modern synthetic biology had enabled candidate vaccines to be produced, obviating the need to culture the infectious virus. However, demonstrating efficacy will take a bit longer.

Well, so much for my media work – what about a scientific contribution? Almost 20 years, I was involved in a project in the collaboration with the Pirbright Institute to develop qPCR controls to combat the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV). These were based on encapsidating FMDV sequences within cowpea mosaic virus (CPMV) particles Encapsidated mimic technology; N-Cap). This work, originally based on infectious CPMV, was successful and was applied to other veterinary diseases in collaboration the Veterinary Laboratories Agency (VLA; now called APHA).

In the past 2 years, Hadrien Peyret, a senior post-doc in my lab, has been working with Leaf Expression Systems and Meridian Biosciences to further develop the N-Cap system, using modern synthetic biology methods, as a source of PCR controls. As a result, we were in an ideal position to rapidly produce appropriate material for incorporation into qPCR-based testing kits for CoVID-19. Hadrien first discussed this on 17th March, the appropriate sequences were ordered on the 19th and arrived at JIC on the 30th.

Hadrien infiltrated plants 6th April, I harvested them on the 13th and by the 16th had purified the particles (yes folks, I really put my lab coat on and ran centrifuges!). The material is currently being evaluated by LES and St. George’s Hospital, London.

In addition to the qPCR controls my group has also been involved in expressing the structural proteins from SARS-CoV-2 in plants, with the aim of providing information to aid the development antibody tests and candidate vaccines. We were very fortunate that Jae-Wan Jung, a sabbatical visitor from S. Korea, has been working on the expression of the equivalent proteins of a related veterinary virus, porcine epidemic diarrhoea virus (PEDV). This gave us a head start and he agreed to shift the focus of his work to SARS-CoV-2.

To enable this, we applied for 12 months funding from the JIC Innovation Fund on the 30th March and received a positive response on 2nd April – not a bad turn-around and many thanks to all concerned. All the necessary DNA sequences have now arrived on-site, so it’s full steam ahead with expression studies.

That’s about it as of 1st May – stay safe.

Written by OpenPlan PI Professor George Lomonossoff