Minghai Chen: CAS Key Laboratory of Quantitative Engineering Biology, Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China.
Chuang Yan: CAS Key Laboratory of Quantitative Engineering Biology, Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China.
Fujun Qin: CAS Key Laboratory of Quantitative Engineering Biology, Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China.
Luping Zheng: CAS Key Laboratory of Quantitative Engineering Biology, Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China.
Xian-En Zhang: Faculty of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China.
Intraviral protein-protein interactions (PPIs) of SARS-CoV-2 in host cells may provide useful information for deep understanding of virology of SARS-CoV-2. In this study, 22 of 55 interactions of the structural and accessory proteins of SARS-CoV-2 were identified by biomolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC) assay. The nucleocapsid (N) protein was found to have the most interactions among the structural and accessory proteins of SARS-CoV-2, and also specifically interacted with the putative packaging signal (PS) of SARS-CoV-2. We also demonstrated that the PS core containing PS576 RNA bears a functional PS, important for the assembly of the viral RNA into virus like particles (VLPs), and the packaging of SARS-CoV-2 RNA was N dependent.
