Robust neutralization assay based on SARS-CoV-2 S-bearing vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) pseudovirus and ACE2-overexpressed BHK21 cells

Hualong Xiong; Yangtao Wu; Jiali Cao; Ren Yang; Jian Ma; Xiaoyang Qiao; Xiangyang Yao; Baohui Zhang; Yali Zhang; Wangheng Hou; Yang Shi; Jingjing Xu; Liang Zhang; Shaojuan Wang; Baorong Fu; Ting Yang; Shengxiang Ge; Jun Zhang; Quan Yuan; Baoying Huang; Zhiyong Li; Tianying Zhang; Ningshao Xia

Viral packaging efficiency is one of the limiting factors for high-throughput in vitro neutralization assay. To select a cell line that is most appropriate for pseudotypes production, we compared the viral titers of VSVdG-SARS-CoV-2-Sdel18 packaged by Vero-E6, BHK21 and 293T cells. The results showed that the Vero-E6 formed more syncytia than the other two cell lines during the packaging, and also produced highest viral titer (Figure 3) , which was about 3×10 5 infectious particles per miniliter. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.08.026948 doi: bioRxiv preprint