The COVID pandemic has very serious consequences, killing more than 7 million people worldwide since its initiation in 2019. Despite the worldwide efforts leading to effective control of the pandemic, the continuous emergence of viral variants has necessitated the ongoing development of SARS-CoV-2 inhibitors. The main protease nsp5 plays a major role in the virus’s life cycle, and also serves as an important drug target for the virus. Our project primarily aims to develop an efficient and reliable in vivo nsp5 inhibitor screening system based on FlipGFP. Additionally, we desire to investigate the possibility of using nsp5, a sequence-specific protease, as a tool enzyme for removing recombinant tags during protein purification.
In this year’s project, we focused on developing an in vivo inhibitor screening platform targeting SARS-CoV-2 nsp5, contributing five new basic parts and four new composite parts to the iGEM community. Our main contributions can be summarized in the following key areas: