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. 2006 Dec 26;3(12):e525. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0030525

Figure 3. Synthetic Reconstruction of icGD03-S.

Figure 3

(A) Unrooted phylogenetic gene tree of 35 SARS isolates ranging from early, middle, and late phases of the 2002–2003 epidemic to 2003–2004 animal isolates. Branch confidence values are shown as posterior probabilities. The three human isolates that fall within the cluster otherwise isolated from animals (shown in boxes), GZ0402, GD03, and GZ0401, may represent infections in which a human acquired the virus from a Himalayan palm civet.

(B) The GDO3-S glycoprotein. Amino acid changes unique to the GDO3-S with the GDO3-S amino acid listed on the left and the corresponding Urbani to the right. The GDO3-S amino acid changes are shown in relation to the S1 and S2 subunits, the receptor binding domain (RBD), heptad repeats one (HR1) and two (HR2), the transmembrane domain (TM), and known neutralizing epitopes. Two mutations that arose during tissue culture passage of the chimeric icGDO3-S are shown in red.

(C) Growth curves of the Urbani strain of SARS-CoV (diamond, solid line), the recombinant Urbani icSARS (squares, dashed line), and the recombinant chimeric virus icGDO3-S (triangles, dotted line) in human airway epithelial cells.

(D) Comparing growth of icSARS-CoV to icGDO3-S in the lungs of mice. Six-week-old female BALB/C mice were infected with icSARS-CoV or icGDO3-S (n = 5 per group). The individual titer of each mouse is represented by a filled circle, and the mean titer of the group is represented as a solid bar.