RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Susceptibility of swine cells and domestic pigs to SARS-CoV-2
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.08.15.252395
DO 10.1101/2020.08.15.252395
A1 David A. Meekins
A1 Igor Morozov
A1 Jessie D. Trujillo
A1 Natasha N. Gaudreault
A1 Dashzeveg Bold
A1 Bianca L. Artiaga
A1 Sabarish V. Indran
A1 Taeyong Kwon
A1 Velmurugan Balaraman
A1 Daniel W. Madden
A1 Heinz Feldmann
A1 Jamie Henningson
A1 Wenjun Ma
A1 Udeni B. R. Balasuriya
A1 Juergen A. Richt
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/08/16/2020.08.15.252395.abstract
AB The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 has resulted in an ongoing global pandemic with significant morbidity, mortality, and economic consequences. The susceptibility of different animal species to SARS-CoV-2 is of concern due to the potential for interspecies transmission, and the requirement for pre-clinical animal models to develop effective countermeasures. In the current study, we determined the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to (i) replicate in porcine cell lines, (ii) establish infection in domestic pigs via experimental oral/intranasal/intratracheal inoculation, and (iii) transmit to co-housed naive sentinel pigs. SARS-CoV-2 was able to replicate in two different porcine cell lines with cytopathic effects. Interestingly, none of the SARS-CoV-2-inoculated pigs showed evidence of clinical signs, viral replication or SARS-CoV-2-specific antibody responses. Moreover, none of the sentinel pigs displayed markers of SARS-CoV-2 infection. These data indicate that although different porcine cell lines are permissive to SARS-CoV-2, five-week old pigs are not susceptible to infection via oral/intranasal/intratracheal challenge. Pigs are therefore unlikely to be significant carriers of SARS-CoV-2 and are not a suitable pre-clinical animal model to study SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis or efficacy of respective vaccines or therapeutics.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.