The power of novel vaccination technologies and their rapid development were elucidated clearly during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, it also became clear that there is an urgent need to discover and manufacture new antivirals that target emerging viral threats. Toxic species of cyanobacteria produce a range of bioactive compounds that makes them good candidates for drug discovery. Nevertheless, few studies demonstrate the antiviral potential of cyanobacteria. This is partly due to the lack of specific and simple protocols designed for the rapid detection of antiviral activity in cyanobacteria and partly because specialized facilities for work with pathogenic viruses are few and far between. We therefore developed an easy method for the screening of cyanobacterial cultures for antiviral activity and used our private culture collection of non-pathogenic virus isolates to show that antiviral activity is a prominent feature in the cyanobacterium Microcystis aeruginosa. In this proof-of-concept study, we show that M. aeruginosa extracts from three different cyanobacterial strains delay infection of diatom-infecting single-stranded DNA and single-stranded RNA viruses by up to 2 days. Our work shows the ease with which cyanobacteria from culture collections can be screened for antiviral activity and highlights the potential of cyanobacteria as an excellent source for the discovery of novel antiviral compounds, warranting further investigation.

中文翻译：

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有毒蓝藻的抗病毒发现：大流行时代唾手可得的成果

新型疫苗接种技术的力量及其快速发展在 COVID-19 大流行期间得到了清晰的阐述。与此同时，人们也清楚地认识到，迫切需要发现和制造针对新出现的病毒威胁的新型抗病毒药物。蓝细菌的有毒物种产生一系列生物活性化合物，使它们成为药物发现的良好候选者。然而，很少有研究证明蓝细菌的抗病毒潜力。部分原因是缺乏为快速检测蓝藻抗病毒活性而设计的具体和简单的方案，部分原因是用于处理病原病毒的专门设施少之又少。因此，我们开发了一种简单的方法来筛选蓝藻培养物的抗病毒活性，并使用我们的非致病性病毒分离株的私人培养物来证明抗病毒活性是蓝藻铜绿微囊藻的一个显着特征。在这项概念验证研究中，我们表明，从三种不同蓝藻菌株中提取的铜绿假单胞菌提取物可将硅藻感染的单链 DNA 和单链 RNA 病毒的感染延迟长达 2 天。我们的工作表明可以轻松地从培养物保藏中筛选蓝藻的抗病毒活性，并强调蓝藻作为发现新型抗病毒化合物的极好来源的潜力，值得进一步研究。