SARS-coronavirus-2 replication in Vero E6 cells: replication kinetics, rapid adaptation and cytopathology

SARS-CoV-2 isolate BetaCoV/Australia/VIC01/2020 (accession number MT007544.1) was propagated during two consecutive passages at low MOI in Vero E6 cells. To verify the identity and genome sequence of this SARS-CoV-2 (p2 stock), genomic RNA was isolated from culture supernatant and sequenced by Illumina Next Generation Sequencing. The resulting consensus sequence was deposited in this Bioproject under the name of p2 stock. In view of plaque size heterogeneity, we performed a plaque assay on the p1 virus stock and picked plaques of small and large size, which were passaged three times in Vero E6 cells while monitoring their plaque phenotype. Some of these virus clones were deep-sequenced and here, we deposit these NGS data for a small-plaque virus clone (S5, passages 1, 2 and 3) and a large-plaque virus (L8, passage 1). More information on the analysis of each sample can be found in https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.20.049924v1.