A Luciferase-fluorescent Reporter Influenza Virus for Live Imaging and Quantification of Viral Infection

Influenza A viruses (IAVs) cause human respiratory disease that is associated with significant health and economic consequences. As with other viruses, studying IAV requires the use of laborious secondary approaches to detect the presence of the virus in infected cells and/or in animal models of infection. This limitation has been recently circumvented with the generation of recombinant IAVs expressing easily traceable fluorescent or bioluminescent (luciferase) reporter proteins. However, researchers have been forced to select fluorescent or luciferase reporter genes due to the restricted capacity of the IAV genome for including foreign sequences. To overcome this limitation, we have generated a recombinant replication-competent bi-reporter IAV (BIRFLU) stably expressing both a fluorescent and a luciferase reporter gene to easily track IAV infections in vitro and in vivo. To this end, the viral non-structural (NS) and hemagglutinin (HA) viral segments of influenza A/Puerto Rico/8/34 H1N1 (PR8) were modified to encode the fluorescent Venus and the bioluminescent Nanoluc luciferase proteins, respectively. Here, we describe the use of BIRFLU in a mouse model of IAV infection and the detection of both reporter genes using an in vivo imaging system. Notably, we have observed a good correlation between the expressions of both reporters and viral replication. The combination of cutting-edge techniques in molecular biology, animal research and imaging technologies, provides researchers the unique opportunity to use this tool for influenza research, including the study of virus-host interactions and dynamics of viral infections. Importantly, the feasibility to genetically alter the viral genome to express two foreign genes from different viral segments opens up opportunities to use this approach for: (i) the development of novel IAV vaccines, (ii) the generation of recombinant IAVs that can be used as vaccine vectors for the treatment of other human pathogen infections.