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When SARS-CoV-2 first began spreading across the globe, not every lab was equipped to study it directly. The virus behind the current pandemic is highly pathogenic and transmissible, leading the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to require many of the same biosafety guidelines that shape the study of diseases such as tuberculosis and Ebola.
As in many moments throughout the last year, the scientific community responded by creatively adapting existing tools to the study of COVID-19. Among these, researchers turned to models of the pathogen such as pseudoviruses and chimeric viruses that can be studied safely in labs with lower biosafety level (BSL) clearance than required for studying the wildtype version, in an effort to expand the study of the novel coronavirus. Pseudoviruses don’t replicate, rendering them harmless, but by replacing their surface envelope proteins with those of SARS-CoV-2, researchers can glean insights ...
