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CRISPR Engineering of Bacteriophage T4 to Design Vaccines Against SARS-CoV-2 and Emerging Pathogens

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Vaccine Design

Part of the book series: Methods in Molecular Biology ((MIMB,volume 2410))

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore the urgent need for vaccine design and delivery platforms that can be rapidly deployed for manufacture and distribution. Though the mRNA and adenoviral vector platforms have been enormously successful to control SARS-CoV-2 viral infections, it is unclear if this could be replicated against more complex pathogens or the emerging variants. Recently, we described a “universal” platform that can incorporate multiple vaccine targets into the same nanoparticle scaffold by CRISPR engineering of bacteriophage T4. A T4-COVID vaccine designed with this technology elicited broad immunogenicity and complete protection against virus challenge in a mouse model. Here, we describe the detailed methodology to generate recombinant bacteriophage T4 backbones using CRISPR that can also be broadly applicable to other bacteriophages that abundantly pervade the Earth.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by NIAID/NIH supplement grant 3R01AI095366-07S1 (subaward: 1100992-100) and in part by NIAID/NIH grants AI111538 and AI081726 and National Science Foundation grant MCB-0923873 to V.B.R.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, USA

    Jingen Zhu, Neeti Ananthaswamy, Swati Jain, Himanshu Batra, Wei-Chun Tang & Venigalla B. Rao

Authors
  1. Jingen Zhu
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  2. Neeti Ananthaswamy
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  3. Swati Jain
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  4. Himanshu Batra
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  5. Wei-Chun Tang
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  6. Venigalla B. Rao
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Venigalla B. Rao .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Lankenau Institute for Medical Research, Wynnewood, PA, USA

    Sunil Thomas

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© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature

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Zhu, J., Ananthaswamy, N., Jain, S., Batra, H., Tang, WC., Rao, V.B. (2022). CRISPR Engineering of Bacteriophage T4 to Design Vaccines Against SARS-CoV-2 and Emerging Pathogens. In: Thomas, S. (eds) Vaccine Design. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2410. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-1884-4_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-1884-4_10

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  • Publisher Name: Humana, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-0716-1883-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-0716-1884-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Protocols

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