Martin Beer

TL;DR: The findings of a World Health Organization expert working group that is developing animal models to test vaccines and therapeutic agents for the treatment of COVID-19, and their relevance for preclinical testing, are reviewed.

TL;DR: In 2011, an unidentified disease in cattle was reported in Germany and the Netherlands and metagenomic analysis identified a novel orthobunyavirus, which subsequently was isolated from blood of affected animals.

TL;DR: Pigs and chickens could not be infected intranasally by SARS-CoV-2, whereas fruit bats showed characteristics of a reservoir host, and virus replication in ferrets resembled a subclinical human infection with efficient spread.

TL;DR: A heterologous in vitro transcript based on a specific primer-probe HEX system was generated as a universal internal control (IC) to improve virus-specific real-time reverse-transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR) assays.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used isogenic SARS-CoV-2 variants to demonstrate that the variant that contains S(D614G) has enhanced binding to the human cell-surface receptor angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE2) and increased replication in primary human bronchial and nasal airway epithelial cultures as well as in a human ACE2 knock-in mouse model.