Multi-color super-resolution imaging to study human coronavirus RNA during cellular infection. Wang et al

To make therapeutic headway against current and future coronaviruses, the biology of coronavirus RNA during infection must be precisely understood. Here, we present a robust and generalizable framework combining high-throughput confocal and super-resolution microscopy imaging to study coronavirus infection at the nanoscale.

Employing the model human coronavirus HCoV-229E, we specifically labeled coronavirus genomic RNA (gRNA) and double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) via multicolor RNA-immunoFISH and visualized their localization patterns within the cell. The exquisite resolution of our approach uncovers a striking spatial organization of gRNA and dsRNA into three distinct structures and enables quantitative characterization of the status of the infection after antiviral drug treatment.