TY - JOUR T1 - Multi-color super-resolution imaging to study human coronavirus RNA during cellular infection JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2021.06.09.447760 SP - 2021.06.09.447760 AU - Jiarui Wang AU - Mengting Han AU - Anish R. Roy AU - Haifeng Wang AU - Leonhard Möckl AU - Leiping Zeng AU - W. E. Moerner AU - Lei S. Qi Y1 - 2022/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/01/13/2021.06.09.447760.abstract N2 - The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the third human coronavirus within 20 years that gave rise to a life-threatening disease and the first to reach pandemic spread. 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. Our approach provides a comprehensive framework that supports investigations of coronavirus fundamental biology and therapeutic effects.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. ER -