In vitro one-pot construction of influenza viral genomes for virus particle synthesis based on reverse genetics system

Abstract

The reverse genetics system, which allows the generation of influenza viruses from plasmids encoding viral genome, is a powerful tool for basic research on viral infection mechanisms and application research such as vaccine development. However, conventional plasmid construction using Escherichia coli (E. coli) cloning is time-consuming and has difficulties handling DNA encoding genes toxic for E. coli or highly repeated sequences. These limitations hamper rapid virus synthesis. In this study, we establish a very rapid in vitro one-pot plasmid construction (IVOC) based virus synthesis. This method dramatically reduced the time for genome plasmid construction, which was used for virus synthesis, from several days or more to about 8 hours. Moreover, infectious viruses could be synthesized with a similar yield to the conventional E. coli cloning-based method with high accuracy. The applicability of this method was also demonstrated by the generation of recombinant viruses carrying reporter genes from the IVOC products. This method is expected to potentially advance further understanding of influenza viruses and apply to other RNA viruses.