A Versatile Recombinant Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) Reporter Strain

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Introduction: Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a major cause of respiratory illness in infants, young children, and the elderly. In the U.S., nearly all children are infected with RSV by age 2, resulting in 75,000-125,000 hospitalizations and 4,000 deaths annually. Worldwide, RSV affects an estimated 64 million people with 160,000 deaths each year. Currently, there is no effective vaccine or small molecule antiviral for RSV. In conventional virology methods, fluorescent viruses often make poor reagents for high throughput assays due to a lack of automated readouts, low sensitivity, limited linearity, and/or off-target inhibition by screening candidates. Due to the lack of appropriate reporter strains, large scale screenings to identify novel therapeutic candidates against RSV can be difficult, and as a result, the identification of broad-spectrum antiviral candidates remains challenging. Therefore, there is a distinct need for efficient screening tools and strategies to enable RSV vaccine development and drug discovery. Technology: Georgia State University researchers have created a recombinant RSV reporter strain that expresses firefly luciferase in the first gene position of the RSV genome. Firefly luciferase is a bioluminescent protein originally derived from Photinus pyralis that has been widely used as a genetic reporter in high throughput screening assays. In this modified RSV, the bioluminescence serves as a reporter for RSV infection or replication activity. Because of this reporter activity, this RSV strain serves as a preferable tool for the high throughput screening of antiviral agents in drug development and for measurement of anti-RSV antibodies in vaccine studies.