An animal model of covid-19 is now available

MICE ARE,ACESARSCVACESARSSARSCVACESARSACE as it were, the guinea pigs of science. And these days they are often genetically engineered guinea pigs, to boot. The emergence of covid-19, for example, has created demand for laboratory animals that have human versions of a protein called the 2 receptor. This molecule is the hook that -o-2, the virus which causes covid-19, uses to attach itself to a cell before entering and turning that cell into a virus factory. The murine version of 2 is, however, the wrong shape for the virus to link up with. That means unmodified mice cannot catch the infection. Hence the need for genetic engineering.The first version of such a mouse has recently become available courtesy of the Jackson Laboratory, a not-for-profit biomedical research institution in Maine that specialises in breeding laboratory mice. By luck, the team that produced it had a head start. The original virus (now known as -o-1), which came close to causing a pandemic in 2003, also uses 2 as its point of entry. As a consequence Stanley Perlman and Paul McCray of the University of Iowa, who were researching , created a mouse with human 2 receptors in 2007.