Researchers use SARS-CoV-2 to bioengineer universal vaccine platform A team of scientists from the United States has recently developed a bioengineered bacteriophage T4 nanoparticle structure using CRISPR technology that can be used as a universal platform to produce vaccines. They used severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) as a model to develop the platform. The study is currently available on the Design of T4-SARS-CoV-2 nanovaccine by CRISPR engineering. Engineered DNAs corresponding to various components of SARS-CoV-2 virion are incorporated into bacteriophage T4 genome. Each DNA was introduced into E. coli as a donor plasmid (a), recombined into injected phage genome through CRISPR-targeted genome editing (b). Different combinations of CoV-2 inserts were then generated by simple phage infections and identifying the recombinant phages in the progeny (c). For example, recombinant phage containing CoV-2 insert #1 (dark blue) can be used to infect CRISPR E. coli containing Co-V2 insert containing donor plasmid #2 (dark red). The progeny plaques obtained will contain recombinant phage #3 with both inserts #1 and #2 (dark blue plus dark red) in the same genome. This process was repeated to rapidly construct a pipeline of multiplex T4-SARS-CoV-2 vaccine phages (d). Selected vaccine candidates were then screened in a mouse model (e) to identify the most potent vaccine (f). Structural model of T4-SARS-CoV-2 Nanovaccine showing an enlarged view of a single hexameric capsomer (g). The capsomer shows six subunits of major capsid protein gp23* (green), trimers of Soc (blue), and a Hoc fiber (yellow) at the center of capsomer. The expressible spike genes are inserted into phage genome, the 12 aa E external peptide (red) is displayed at the tip of Hoc fiber, S-trimers (cyan) are attached to Soc subunits, and nucleocapsid proteins (yellow) are packaged in genome core. See Results, Materials and Methods, and Supplementary Video for additional details.