{"doi":"10.1126/science.abl6184","title":"Rapid assessment of SARS-CoV-2–evolved variants using virus-like particles","abstract":"Efforts to determine why new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants demonstrate improved fitness have been limited to analyzing mutations in the spike (S) protein with the use of S-pseudotyped particles. In this study, we show that SARS-CoV-2 virus-like particles (SC2-VLPs) can package and deliver exogenous transcripts, enabling analysis of mutations within all structural proteins and at multiple steps in the viral life cycle. In SC2-VLPs, four nucleocapsid (N) mutations found universally in more-transmissible variants independently increased messenger RNA delivery and expression ~10-fold, and in a reverse genetics model, the serine-202→arginine (S202R) and arginine-203→methionine (R203M) mutations each produced >50 times as much virus. SC2-VLPs provide a platform for rapid testing of viral variants outside of a biosafety level 3 setting and demonstrate N mutations and particle assembly to be mechanisms that could explain the increased spread of variants, including B.1.617.2 (Delta, which contains the R203M mutation).","journal":"Science","year":2021,"id":145607,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":356,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9554,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":385627,"name":"Taha Y. Taha","orcid":"0000-0002-7344-7490","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":618114,"name":"Takako Tabata","orcid":"0000-0001-9861-7647","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":562758,"name":"Irene P. Chen","orcid":"0000-0002-5766-9253","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":2372,"name":"Alison Ciling","orcid":"0000-0002-8393-6829","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":568701,"name":"Mir M. Khalid","orcid":"0000-0002-1862-6795","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":615705,"name":"Bharath Sreekumar","orcid":"0000-0003-2793-1502","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":615706,"name":"Peiyi Chen","orcid":"0000-0002-7639-2325","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":227951,"name":"Jennifer M. Hayashi","orcid":"0000-0001-7153-9212","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":580679,"name":"Katarzyna M. Soczek","orcid":"0000-0003-3803-6079","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":103701,"name":"Mélanie Ott","orcid":"0000-0002-5697-1274","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":2407,"name":"Jennifer A. Doudna","orcid":"0000-0001-9161-999X","position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":2371,"name":"Abdullah M. Syed","orcid":"0000-0001-9156-9662","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":35,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:42:12.871665Z","pmid":"34735219","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}