A Synthetic Virology Platform for Rapid Prototyping of Influenza A Virus mutants

A synthetic virology platform enables seamless prototyping of Influenza A virus mutants by computationally designing restriction-site inserts to rescue synthetic viruses.

• Why it matters: Rapid in vitro testing is needed to study novel IAV variants, including how altered antigenic sites affect immunogenicity and antiviral immunity.
• What they did: The approach inserts restriction sites into an ambisense plasmid to swap full HA, HA globular head for head/stalk chimeras, or the five canonical antigenic sites, then rescues synthetic IAV from designed inserts.
• The result: Using viral genome sequence alone, the platform rescued IAV H1N1, H3N2, and H5N1 and enabled antigenic-site mutants and chimeric viruses, supporting vaccine seed strain generation and immunity studies.

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