Understanding Human Coronavirus HCoV-NL63

Abdul-Rasool, Sahar; Fielding, Burtram C

tract infection (coryza, conjunctivitis, and fever), while his chest X-ray showed typical features of bronchiolitis. The aspirate tested negative for all known respiratory viruses. A group of Dutch scientists found that the virus initiated a cytopathic effect when inoculated onto tertiary monkey kidney cells. The group used a new technique, VIDISCA, to clone and amplify the viral genome. VIDISCA is a novel approach that provides a fast and effective tool for amplification of unknown genomes based on cDNAamplified fragment length polymorphism [2, 18] . The virus was identified as a member of the Coronaviridae family. It was shown to be a novel member of Group I coronaviruses because of the similarity of its genome sequence to HCoV-229E. Another group in the Netherlands [19] reported the independent isolation and identification of, essentially, the same virus at about the same time.