ABOVE: A pseudocolored electron micrograph shows SARS-CoV-2 (pink) inside the lysosomes (outlined in green) of an African green monkey kidney cell.
CHRIS BLECK, NIH
Scientists know a lot about how SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, gets into cells. Now, in a study published October 27 in Cell, researchers have determined that mouse hepatitis virus and SARS-CoV-2, both of which are members of the β-coronavirus family, get out of cells via lysosomes, organelles responsible for taking out cellular garbage, rather than using the biosynthetic secretory pathway used by most other enveloped viruses.
“There hasn't been a whole lot of cell biology done on coronavirus assembly and release from cells, which is important . . . because we have no antivirals that target these later steps of the virus infection cycle,” says Carolyn Machamer, a cell biologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who was not involved in ...
