Recreating the Biological Steps of Viral Infection on a Bioelectronic Platform to Profile Viral Variants of Concern

Abstract

Viral mutation rates frequently outpace the development of technologies used to detect and identify harmful variants; for SARS Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), these are called variants of concern (VOC). Given the continual emergence of VOC, there is a critical need to develop platforms that can identify the presence of a virus and readily identify its propensity for infection. We present an electronic biomembrane sensing platform that recreates the multifaceted and sequential biological cues that give rise to distinct SARS-CoV-2 virus host cell entry pathways and reports the progression of entry steps of these pathways as electrical signals. Within these electrical signals, two necessary entry processes mediated by the viral Spike protein, virus binding and membrane fusion, can be distinguished. Remarkably, we find that closely related VOC exhibit distinct fusion signatures that correlate with trends reported in cell-based infectivity assays, allowing us to report quantitative differences in fusion characteristics among them that inform their infectivity potentials. This cell-free biomimetic infection platform also has a virus-free option that equally reports infectivity potential of the Spike proteins. We used SARS-CoV-2 as our prototype, but we anticipate that this platform will extend to other enveloped viruses and cell lines to quantifiably explore virus/host interactions. This advance should aid in faster determination of entry characteristics and fusogenicities of future VOC, necessary for rapid response.