Isolation and Growth Characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 in Vero Cell.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by SARS-CoV-2, broke out in early December 2019 has escalated into a global pandemic (Lai et al. 2020). Till the May 20th 2020, more than 4,700,000 people were infected and the number is still increasing especially in Europe, North America and Asia (https://covid19.who.int/). And there is an urgent need to understand the biology of SARS-CoV-2. Here we report the isolation and characterization of seven isolates of SARS-CoV-2 from seven patients. All these isolates were adapted to grow in Vero cells, and showed significant different replication characteristics. Sequence analysis revealed that these viruses shared similar sequences to reported SARS-CoV-2 strains, except for 8#.