Synthetic coronavirus created with brewer’s yeast comes with research options, hope and a warning
- Fungus has been used for thousands of years to make wine, beer and bread
- Man-made strains will bridge the gap between the real-life virus and computer modelling, Chinese scientist says
This development would help “provide an infectious virus to health authorities and diagnostic laboratories without the need of having access to clinical samples”, said the researchers led by Joerg Jores and Volker Thiel from the University of Bern in Switzerland, in a paper published in Nature on Monday.
The man-made strains not only returned almost identical sequence readings but replicated in a similar manner to the natural strains, which came from a Covid-19 patient in Munich, Germany.
The technology developed by Thiel’s team was based on the idea of reverse genetics.
In theory, biological engineers can recreate a life form if they know its full genome sequence. In real life though, they can only synthesise some simple organisms with short genome sequences.
